MODERN CPU INTERNALS 2025 DEEP DIVE - Expanded Project Guides

Generated from: MODERN_CPU_INTERNALS_2025_DEEP_DIVE.md

This folder contains deep-dive guides for each project in the learning path.

Overview

These guides expand each project into a full learning guide with theory, architecture, implementation phases, testing, and extensions.

Project Index

# Project Difficulty Time Key Focus
1 The Human Pipeline Trace Level 1: Beginner 1-2 weeks Pipelining / Hazards
2 The Branch Predictor Torture Test Level 2: Intermediate 1-2 weeks Branch Prediction / TAGE
3 Speculative Side-Channel Explorer (Spectre-lite) Level 4: Expert 1-2 weeks Security / Speculative Execution
4 The uOp Cache Prober Level 3: Advanced 1-2 weeks Front-end / uOp Cache
5 Execution Port Pressure Map Level 3: Advanced 1-2 weeks Execution Units / Throughput
6 Memory Disambiguation Probe Level 4: Expert 1-2 weeks Load/Store Buffers / Speculation
7 The Reorder Buffer (ROB) Boundary Finder Intermediate 1-2 weeks See project details
8 Macro-op Fusion Detector Level 2: Intermediate 1-2 weeks Decoding / Instruction Fusion
9 L1 Bandwidth Stressor (Zen 5 focus) Intermediate 1-2 weeks See project details
10 Lunar Lake P vs E Core Profiler Intermediate 1-2 weeks See project details

Prerequisites

  • Basic programming and system fundamentals
  • Comfort with command line tooling