Author's Latest Posts


Artificial Intelligence Wonderland


Silicon Catalyst held its Sixth Annual Semiconductor Forum in Menlo Park on the SRI campus on November 9th. Richard Curtin, Managing Partner for Si Catalyst, opened the event with a reference to Arthur C. Clarke’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" and noted how remarkable it was that a novel written back in 1968 was able to foretell the direction of the computer industry over 50 years into the future. ... » read more

Leaps in Quantum Computing


There are new computers that are generating some amazing results for solving problems in record time.  You won’t see these computers on the classic Top500 lists though, because they aren’t approaching computing in the same way. Using quantum computing algorithms like Shor’s algorithm for factoring large numbers, quantum computing holds the promise of solving problems that take exponentia... » read more

IBM’s Energy-Efficient NorthPole AI Unit


At this point it is well known that from an energy efficiency standpoint, the biggest bang for the back is to be found at the highest levels of abstraction. Fitting the right architecture to the task at hand i.e., an application specific architecture, will lead to benefits that are hard or impossible to claw back later in the design and implementation flow.  With the huge increase in the inter... » read more

Performance & Efficiency Cores For Servers


HotChips 2023 was held August 27-29, 2023 at Stanford University in California and was the first in-person version of the conference in 4 years. The conference was held in a hybrid format that had over 500 participants in-person and over 1,000 attending virtually online. Topics covered a broad range of advancements in computing, connectivity, and computer architecture. Both AMD and Intel gav... » read more

Managing Voltage Variation


Engineers make many tradeoffs when designing SoC’s to better meet design specifications. Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are the primary goals and all three impact the cost of the implementation. For example, higher power and performance can both require more expensive packaging for power and signal integrity as well as cooling. The larger the die area the fewer die per wafer which drives u... » read more

Supercomputing Efficiency Lags Performance Gains


In last month’s article, Top 500: Frontier is Still on Top, I wrote about the latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists. Power is an incredibly important aspect of designing a world performance leading supercomputer. (Why, I can remember back to when you could run the world’s fastest machine on only a couple MW of power.) The first Green500 list was published back in 2013. Happy 1... » read more

Top500: Frontier Is Still On Top


The latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists were just released on May 22, 2023. The last time that I wrote about the Green500, a Chinese machine, NRCPC’s Sunway TaihuLight, was sitting at the top of the Top500 list. It’s been a while since I last wrote about these lists and it’s interesting to look back at the leap in performance and energy efficiency over the past 7 years. ... » read more

TSMC Targets N2 Production For 2025


April ended with TSMC’s financial results for the 1st Quarter of 2023 reported on April 20, 2023, and their North American Technology Symposium was held on April 27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. TSMC’s N3 entered volume production in 4Q 2022 and TSMC’s N2 “nanosheet” technology is on schedule for production in 2025. TSMC’s CEO, C.C. Wei, said during the 1Q conference cal... » read more

Squeezing The Margins


Back in 2016, we looked at the MediaTek Helio X20, the first Tri-Gear mobile SoC. Tri-Gear is a step beyond ARM’s big.LITTLE concept of using two different cores that have unique power and performance characteristics, by adding a third core. The main advantage to this approach is having more core choices to best run workloads at better energy efficiency and performance operating points. At... » read more

TSMC: 10nm To Be Greater Than 10% Of 2017 Wafer Revenue


TSMC’s financial results for the 4th Quarter of 2016 were released on January 11, 2017 (PST) and showed that year-over-year fourth quarter revenue increased 28.8% and simultaneously net income and diluted EPS both increased 37.6%.  In U.S. dollars, TSMC’s fourth quarter revenue was $8.25 billion. TSMC's CFO, Ms. Lora Ho, reported that 2016 was a good year for TSMC and that the company set ... » read more

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