A Bench-To-In-Field Telemetry Platform For Data Center Power Management


By Aakash Jani and Venkatesh Santhanagopalan NVIDIA's Blackwell platform delivered roughly 15% lower energy and 13% higher throughput [1]. Those gains came from hardware-firmware co-design that matches operating points to each workload, not a new process node. Most SoCs do not adapt: their margins are set and frozen the day silicon ships, based on the workloads measured at the bench. The mi... » read more

Detect, Diagnose, And Debug Using Sensors And Functional Monitoring


By Hari Mani, Henrique Mendes, and Robert Wilcox Modern AI workloads drive an extremely "spiky" power profile where current demands surge to hundreds of Amps within nanoseconds, clashing with the tighter operating ranges of advanced process nodes as they push below 0.8V. This creates a physical bottleneck: the on-die power delivery network (PDN) cannot sustain the instantaneous curren... » read more

Setting Vmin With Transistor-Level PDN Telemetry


By Hans Yeager and Aakash Jani Curious about how to precisely determine the optimal voltage-regulator setpoints for your System-on-Chip (SoC)? In this video, we dive into how transistor-level Power Delivery Network (PDN) telemetry can revolutionize your approach to power, performance, and reliability. The voltage you set at the regulator (V-Min-VR) is rarely what the transistors actually ... » read more

Droop And Silent Data Corruption


By Aakash Jani and Lee Vick Let me set the scene. You are a child psychologist (played by, let’s say, Bruce Willis for illustrative purposes), and you are sitting next to a frightened kid. He turns to you and whispers, “I see dead bits.” Okay, I grant you that’s not exactly the quote, but data center operators are seeing transient errors at an alarming rate, and at scale. These error... » read more

Staying Within The Margins


Last March I wrote an article called Squeezing the Margins that’s about a design that used an adaptive clocking scheme to keep the performance of a system high while simultaneously keeping the temperature below a specified maximum. Last August we looked at Managing Voltage Variation and how an adaptive clocking scheme could be used to manage dynamic voltage drop to maximize system performance... » read more

Brain-Inspired, Silicon Optimized


The 2024 International Solid State Circuits Conference was held this week in San Francisco. Submissions were up 40% and contributed to the quality of the papers accepted and the presentations given at the conference. The mood about the future of semiconductor technology was decidedly upbeat with predictions of a $1 trillion industry by 2030 and many expecting that the soaring demand for AI e... » read more

TSMC Reports 4Q2023 Earnings: N2 Still On Track For 2025 Production


TSMC reported their 4th quarter and end of year financial numbers for 2023. Year over year, net revenue was down 4.5% to NT$2,161.74 billion, but quarter over quarter revenue was essentially flat at NT$625.52 billion, so it appears that as 3nm is ramping up that revenue is improving. For the fourth quarter, 3nm contributed 15% of TSMC’s total wafer revenue, up from 6% in the third quarter ... » read more

Top500: Frontier Still On Top, Sunway Formally Reappears


New versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists have been released, and Frontier continues its reign at Number. 1. But a newcomer, Aurora, using Intel’s Sapphire Rapids, has entered at the Number 2 position with a “half-scale” system. Both machines are HPE Crays, with the former using AMD optimized third-gen EPYC 64C at 2.0GHz and AMD Instinct MI250X, while the latter uses Intel Xeon CPU... » read more

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

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