SPEC CPU2026 broadens the workload set to 52 tests and highlights Zen 5 and Lion Cove delivering stronger core throughput, while the Ampere eMAG reference remains notably slower on modern cores.
An in-depth, hands-on account of building floating-point arithmetic from scratch for bfloat16/minifloats, covering hardware design trade-offs, verification, tapeouts, and standardization quirks in IEEE 754 and C++.
Herbie automatically rewrites floating-point expressions to improve accuracy, showing substantial numeric gains, multiple alternatives, and speedups, demonstrated via tutorials and a math.js bug workflow.
Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087 reveals an eight-entry, 80-bit stack with push/pop rules, a carry-lookahead adder and toggle-based increment/decrement, plus a dense, multi-layer RAM-like register file and a semi-analog microcode ROM; the design produced stack overflow/underflow pitfalls that affected compiler and OS support, and was eventually superseded by SSE/AVX.
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