AMD’s documentation for the CPU may or may not state such things as “There are six integer ALUs, four address generation units, three branch units, four vector ALUs, and two vector read/write units”, but even if it does, Agnes Fog runs actual code to check that, and often discovers corner cases that the official documentation doesn’t mention.

So, he black box tests the CPU to try and discover its innards.

> Agnes Fog

Agner