tag: AMD

AMD’s Bobcat Processor
By Barry Pangrle - 09 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

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

Capping Tools Tame Electromigration
By Mark LaPedus - 31 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus The shift towards the 28nm node and beyond has put the spotlight back on the interconnect in semiconductor manufacturing. In chip scaling, the big problem in the interconnect is resistance-capacitance (RC). Another, and sometimes forgotten, issue is electromigration. “Electromigration gets worse in device scaling,” said Daniel Edelstein, an IBM Fellow and manager of BE... » read more

SoC Platforms Gain Steam
By Ed Sperling - 26 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Platforms are attracting far more attention from makers of SoCs because they are pre-verified and can speed time to market, but the shift isn’t so simple. It will spark major changes in the way companies design and build chips, causing significant disruption across the entire SoC ecosystem. Platforms are nothing new in the processor and software world. Intel, IBM AMD, and N... » read more

The 28nm Foundry Crunch
By Ed Sperling - 29 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Faced with huge and unforeseen demand at the 28nm node, leading-edge foundries are scrambling to play catch-up and are boosting their fab capacities at a staggering pace. But analysts warn that 28nm foundry capacity will be tight throughout 2012, and perhaps into 2013, putting some chipmakers in a pinch. Many blame the 28nm foundry capacity shortfall on a combination of t... » read more

Server Processor War Heats Up
By Kurt Shuler - 26 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Kurt Shuler Yesterday’s announcement that Intel will acquire Cray’s interconnect hardware program, including IP and 74 employees, is the latest salvo in the race to develop commercially viable massively multicore server processors. On the surface, this acquisition seems like another instance of Intel beefing up its board-level interconnect technology, after having already acquired Fu... » 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

Why PCs And Servers Aren’t Going Away
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee With the rise of mobile appliances, smart phones and tablets, there has been a lot of discussion about the place for PCs, servers, embedded processors and networks. A number of companies have claimed they will rule the world of computing and there will no room for others. Reality seems to be somewhat different, however. The mobile end point devices—smart phones, table... » read more

Intel vs. AMD: Who’s Right?
By Barry Pangrle - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

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

Undervolting & Underclocking
By Barry Pangrle - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

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

Speed Demons
By Barry Pangrle - 01 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle For extreme world record performance levels, the required power levels are also typically extreme. It’s that age-old battle against diminishing returns to squeeze out every last drop of performance versus practical limits and wallets. For example, a top fuel dragster can consume about six gallons of fuel for a quarter-mile run down the strip. As has previously been shown ... » read more

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