tag: MIPS

Raising The Stakes For IP
By Ed Sperling - 14 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling As the amount of IP in an SoC increases, so do the number of players who want to strengthen their position in this market. The big acquisitions that began several years ago over time have proved to be just opening salvos—something that was impossible to predict when this shift began. Synopsys’ purchase of Virage Logic and Cadence’s purchase of Denali, both of which occu... » read more

Lessons From Past Architecture Wars
By Marc David Levenson - 24 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Marc David Levenson There was an interesting IEEE panel discussion in Silicon Valley recently, reviewing the microprocessor architecture wars of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. How did the Intel x86 architecture become so dominant when there were other capable designs, including more efficient RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) chips? How did the x86s overcome competition from Zilog, M... » read more

Virtual IDM Progress Report
By Ed Sperling - 06 Dec, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Complexity, tight power budgets, disaggregation of the supply chain and market fragmentation are conspiring to force much tighter partnerships among companies that develop different pieces of an SoC, as well as those that collaborate on even larger systems. This confluence of factors has forced the rules for how companies work together to be rewritten, but even within that frame... » read more

ARM Vs. Intel, Phase Two
By Ed Sperling - 07 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

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

CPU Architectures Get Specific
By Ed Sperling - 11 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler SoC and system design is already complicated, but as complexity continues to rise the industry must determine how to maintain sensitivity to power and cost and performance in the CPU architecture. Where does this stand today—not just with architectures and microarchitectures for consumer electronics but all other kinds of applications? What kinds of changes... » read more

Your Job is Harder Than Mine
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

What I do for a living is listen – a lot – and try to make sense of the myriad challenges that I hear about in terms of design and managing power and performance. What you do as an architect, design engineer or verification engineer is live in the trenches with it all, every day. I admire and respect that. This is especially true as I recently pondered and talked with industry luminaries... » read more

Bridging The Rift Between Software And Hardware
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling As more computing is done on mobile devices rather than desktops, the idea of what constitutes good application software is changing. This addresses the key reason why some of advanced power-saving features built into chips were not utilized by software in the past. Unless the operating systems were specifically written for mobile devices, such as Android and iOS, the real f... » read more

Picking The Right Processor
By Frank Schirrmeister - 24 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 1

By Frank Schirrmeister In an embedded system, the sole connection point between the software and the hardware is the processor. Somewhere right now the effort to develop software for a complex System-on-Chip (SoC) is surpassing the effort of developing the chip itself. As I pointed out in my recent description of the Design West conference in San Jose, complex ecosystems of related content, to... » read more

Coherency Becomes A Stack Of Issues
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling As complexity increases and the industry increasingly shifts away from ASICs to SoCs, the concept of coherency is beginning to look more like a stack of issues than a discrete piece of the design. There are at least five levels of coherency that need to be considered already, with more likely to surface as stacked die become mainstream over the next few years. Perhaps even mo... » read more

New Winners And Losers
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

The realignment of the semiconductor industry has begun, most of it beneath the radar screen. In a disaggregated supply chain, any piece in isolation looks insignificant. But taken together, these shifts begin to paint a picture of a broad realignment and refocusing of the entire industry that ultimately will cement the fortunes of some and create new winners and losers out of others. The fi... » read more

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