Return To Claremont


By Barry Pangrle Intel’s Gregory Ruhl gave an update presentation on Intel’s Claremont IA-32 near-threshold voltage (NTV) and wide dynamic range processor at Hot Chips 24. (I’ve also written an earlier article about Claremont here.) There are many challenges in building a part that operates across a broad range of voltages and Intel listed reduced ratios of on-current vs. off-current, re... » read more

IBM’s Power7+ Processor


By Barry Pangrle Hot Chips 24 was held Aug. 27-29 with tutorials on the first day and 30-minute technical presentations plus keynote addresses on the second and third days. There were a lot of great presentations and Hot Chips is definitely one of my favorite conferences. So out of all of the presentations, why did I choose IBM’s Scott Taylor’s on Power7+? Well, it’s likely that I’l... » read more

AMD’s Bobcat Processor


Barry Pangrle The International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED) was held last week in Redondo Beach, California. There were many good presentations and keynote addresses and a topic that’s near to my heart, near-threshold voltage computing, was often discussed along with how best to (or not) handle variability. One paper out of many that caught my attention was The ... » read more

Dealing With Variability


By Barry Pangrle Process, voltage and temperature, a.k.a. PVT, are well known to designers who are working to complete “signoff” for their designs. In order for a design to be production-ready, it’s necessary to ensure that the design is going to yield parts at a sufficiently high percentage for profitability and that it will still operate within the expected variation of the process and... » read more

Efficiency Vs. Accuracy


By Barry Pangrle If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I wrote an article, Power vs. Accuracy, last year that discussed tradeoffs between power and accuracy for different applications. It turns out that for a number of processing applications, if every bit isn’t perfect, the impact on the final result might not be all that great. Anyone performing financial analytical... » read more

Intel’s Hot New Tri-Gate Processors


By Barry Pangrle Intel announced its newest third-generation Core processors on April 23rd. There has been much anticipation surrounding these new chips from Intel, largely because of their new 22nm tri-gate process technology used to fabricate these devices. Figure 1, from the presentation entitled, “Intel’s Revolutionary 22nm Transistor Technology,” by Mark Bohr and Kaizad Mistry, s... » read more

FinFET Vs. Tri-Gate


By Barry Pangrle A large portion of the Common Platform Technology Forum, recently held in Santa Clara, was dedicated to presentations about 14nm process technologies and FinFETS. If you missed the event and are interested, many of the presentations are available from a link off of the Common Platform home page. Dick James wrote a nice article about GlobalFoundries’ claim that its FinFETS ar... » read more

Intel vs. AMD: Who’s Right?


By Barry Pangrle It’s all about the system. One energy-efficient component doesn’t an energy-efficient system make. There were two big announcements recently made by the industry’s two x86 designers. One was by Intel announcing its new Sandy Bridge Xeon Processor E5-2600 product family, and the other one was by AMD announcing its planned acquisition of SeaMicro. Both of these announce... » read more

A Brief History Of Power Formats


Barry Pangrle A lot has happened in the industry in the way of power format standards over the past seven years. I’m going to attempt to hit on some of the highlights over that time period, especially with regards to the “Big 3” EDA vendors to hopefully put it all into better context for our readers. Early on, circa 2005, Mentor Graphics was working on a power format referred to as th... » read more

Undervolting & Underclocking


By Barry Pangrle Last month we looked at record-breaking clock frequencies accompanied by voltage levels over 2V for some high-speed x86 processors. This month we’re going to go in the opposite direction—reducing the voltage and clock frequency to reduce power. Our processor of choice is the AMD A8-3850, a 100W, 2.9 GHz, quad-core, x86 processor that also incorporates 400 “Radeon core... » read more

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