Foundry Models In Transition


By Jeff Chappell There may have been a time when AMD founder Jerry Sanders famous quote: "real men (i.e., real companies) have their own fabs” rang true, but in today's business climate it seems quaint at best. Fabless or fab-lite business models are more popular than ever today, while some IDMs have turned back the clock, so to speak, looking to improve capacity utilization and revenues ... » read more

x86 Processor Road Map No Longer Just About Speed


By Ed Sperling The decades-old approach of powerful processors with ever-faster clock speeds is changing. Performance matters in some settings, but the real concern is adding more functionality within power budgets. The most pressing tradeoff is now performance vs. power, which has forced processor architects at AMD, Intel and IBM to take into account everything from application software to... » read more

Have You Had A V8 today?


By Nithya Ruff The quick road to the recommended daily allowance of vegetables and fruits is often a bottle of V8. It’s quick, nutritious, and it makes us feel less guilty about any of our nutritional imbalances. It makes us feel virtuous, because we have done something good for our body today. So why do we postpone the inevitable? By this I mean developing new software for a new piec... » read more

The Week In Review: Feb. 25


By Mark LaPedus Is China set to bail out a U.S. government technology darling? Two Chinese automotive companies, Geely and Dongfeng Motor, are reported to have bid between $200 million and $350 million for a majority stake in Fisker, the maker of plug-in hybrid cars. If that happens Fisker—which has $192 million in U.S. federal government loan guarantees—could be headed to China, according... » read more

Multicore Madness


By Mark LaPedus Smartphones and tablets are migrating towards new and faster application processors, basebands, graphics chips and memories. In the cell-phone chipset area alone, there are a multitude of options and design considerations. Some devices combine the application processor and modem on the same chip. Some are separate devices. In addition, the architectures range from single- to... » read more

Shaking Up The Green500


Barry Pangrle Last September, I wrote about the efficiency of IBM’s Power7+ architecture in my blog. IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer (a BlueGene/Q system) this past June had just shot to the top of the Supercomputing Top500 chart, clocking in at 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark. Other systems built around the IBM BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom were also dominating the top o... » read more

Node Skipping Reaches New Heights


By Mark LaPedus For years, silicon foundries have rolled out their respective leading-edge processes roughly on a two-year cadence. The long-standing goal has been to keep foundry customers on a competitive price, power and performance curve. But as leading-edge chipmakers move from the 28nm node and beyond, the predictable process progression is changing. And the phenomenon of “node skip... » read more

New Incentives For Lowering Power


By Ed Sperling Despite all the focus by design teams on lowering power over the past few years, in many applications power is still the last consideration for many companies in the power-performance-area equation. That’s beginning to change, however, even for applications that in the past have not been particularly power-sensitive. There are several reasons for this shift. No. 1 on the li... » read more

ARM Vs. Intel, Phase Two


From 60,000 feet, ARM’s TechCon and the Intel Developer Forum look remarkably similar. The key message from both is a focus on improving performance in processors while significantly lowering power. Intel wants a piece of the mobile market so badly it can taste it. And ARM, which is the primary processing engine inside of the iPhone and one of a couple in Android-based devices—MIPS has ... » read more

SPOTLIGHT ON FD-SOI, FINFETS AT IEEE SOI CONFERENCE
;1-4 OCT, NAPA


The 38th annual SOI Conference is coming right up. Sponsored by IEEE Electron Devices Society, this is the only dedicated SOI conference covering the full technology chain from materials to devices, circuits and system applications. Chaired this year by Gosia Jurczak (manager of the Memories Program at imec), this excellent conference is well worth attending. It’s where the giants of the ... » read more

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