New Robots Require New Ways To Think About Processors


We’re on the cusp of a revolution in robots. After years of relatively moderate growth, sales of commercial and industrial robots are slated to grow by 25% to 35% per year over the next decade, according to Boston Consulting Group, and could reach $260 billion by 2030 to meet the demands of manufacturers, retailers and others to streamline supply chains, enhance safety and boost productivity.... » read more

Choosing Which Tasks To Optimize In Chips


The optimization of one or more tasks is an important aspect of every SoC created, but with so many options now on the table it is often unclear which is best. Just a few years ago, most people were happy to buy processors from the likes of Intel, AMD and Nvidia, and IP cores from Arm. Some even wanted the extensibility that came from IP cores like Tensilica and ARC. Then, in 2018, John Henn... » read more

Semiconductor Scaling Is Failing — What Next For Processors?


This in-depth paper looks at the changing dynamics in the semiconductor industry. In other words, why many companies are looking to customize their processor designs to keep pace with software and system demands. It goes onto highlight the opportunities available to companies of all sizes, in seeking to differentiate and specialize their processor designs. Click here to read more. » read more

Why Comparing Processors Is So Difficult


Every new processor claims to be the fastest, the cheapest, or the most power frugal, but how those claims are measured and the supporting information can range from very useful to irrelevant. The chip industry is struggling far more than in the past to provide informative metrics. Twenty years ago, it was relatively easy to measure processor performance. It was a combination of the rate at ... » read more

Assuring Reliable Processor Performance At Scale


In today’s data center environment, resilience is key. Cloud providers are built on as-a-service business models, where uptime is critical to ensure their customers’ business continuity. Reputation and competitiveness require service at extremely high performance, low power, and increasing functionality, with zero tolerance for unplanned downtime or errors. If you’re a hyperscaler, o... » read more

How To Extend The ‘Unscalable’ RISC Architectures


A couple of years ago, Erik McClure (a Microsoft software developer, at the time) published a blog entitled RISC Is Fundamentally Unscalable.  This blog was really quite interesting and made some very good points about the limitations of a pure RISC design. The limitations of a pure RISC design It takes me back: some of my first marketing tasks were around the religious war between RISC ... » read more

Amdahl Limits On AI


Software and hardware both place limits on how fast an application can run, but finding and eliminating the limitations is becoming more important in this age of multicore heterogeneous processing. The problem is certainly not new. Gene Amdahl (1922-2015) recognized the issue and published a paper about it in 1967. It provided the theoretical speedup for a defined task that could be expected... » read more

On-Chip FPGA: The “Other” Compute Resource


When system companies discuss processing requirements for their next generation products, the typical discussion invariably leads to: what should the processor subsystem look like? Do you upgrade the embedded processors in the current subsystem to the latest and greatest embedded CPU? Do you add more CPUs? Or perhaps add a little diversity by adding a DSP or GPU? One compute resource tha... » read more

Meeting Processor Performance And Safety Requirements For New ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Systems


By Fergus Casey and Srini Krishnaswami Innovation in today’s automotive industry is accelerating as companies race to be the market leader in safety and autonomous vehicles. With vehicle control moving from humans to the vehicles’ active safety systems, more sensors – cameras, radar, lidar, etc. – are being added to automotive systems. More sensors require more computational performa... » read more

Factoring 2048-bit RSA Integers in 177 Days with 13 436 Qubits and a Multimode Memory


Abstract: "We analyze the performance of a quantum computer architecture combining a small processor and a storage unit. By focusing on integer factorization, we show a reduction by several orders of magnitude of the number of processing qubits compared with a standard architecture using a planar grid of qubits with nearest-neighbor connectivity. This is achieved by taking advantage of a tem... » read more

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