tag: IBM

It’s All About Power
By Ann Mutschler - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

In my last entry regarding IBM’s claim for new x86 technology for the datacenter, I mentioned I was trying to get an answer from IBM regarding details on the “silicon innovation” it used. That quest is ongoing, and I hope to find some actual technology, and not just marketing mumbo-jumbo at the heart of it. Keep checking back, I will give my report here. Just a few weeks after Big Blue... » read more

Grappling With Graphene
By Brian Fuller - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Brian Fuller Silicon CMOS is a tough act to follow. The workhorse building block for the world’s electronics has been delivering for system designers for a half century. Despite hand-wringing over its apparent scalability limits, it shows only vague signs of slowing down. For nearly as many years, it seems, the next great material or alternative to silicon CMOS has popped into the indu... » read more

The Long And Painful Path To Power Optimization
By Ed Sperling - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Think about any mobile Internet device today. Batteries typically last all day, applications shut down with ease, and the number of things it can do has reached the point where many people typically carry one device on the road rather than multiple devices they used to lug around several years ago. Perhaps even more astounding is the price drop on these devices. A basic cell ... » read more

New x86 Technology For The Datacenter?
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

I wasn’t too surprised when IBM announced new servers early this month that they claim “break constraints of 30-year technology design,” since Big Blue is constantly releasing new products that they say are groundbreaking in one way or another. Reading deeper into the news, IBM is using new semiconductor technology at the heart of its new eX5 servers that it said took its engineering t... » read more

Remaking The Design Landscape
By Ed Sperling - 28 Jan, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Every now and then a new trend comes along in the semiconductor design world, often because an old tool doesn’t work well anymore or because a new one is achieving critical mass. Lithography moved to immersion when the wavelength couldn’t be refracted far enough anymore. Designers at the advanced end of Moore’s Law began using tools like high-level synthesis and Transa... » read more

Journey To The Center Of The Ecosystem
By Ed Sperling - 14 Jan, 2010 - Comments: 0

From the outside it looks like business as usual, but the race for board seats on the GSA has become particularly competitive this year. GSA originally was created as an organization for fabless companies, but you wouldn’t know that looking at its membership roster. It has evolved into a who’s who of the entire semiconductor supply chain, including everyone from foundries like TSMC and... » read more

Greener Data Centers
By Ed Sperling - 10 Dec, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling For decades the race inside the data center was all about performance. If you upgraded from an IBM Series/370 mainframe to a Series/380 your applications ran faster. And if you upgraded your PC server from a Pentium II to a Pentium 4 you got significantly better performance. The race now is to reduce the number of servers altogether, to lower the cooling costs per server ra... » read more

Hypervisors For Managing Power
By Ed Sperling - 12 Nov, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Hypervisors are headed for a new role inside of multicore chips—managing the various power islands in addition to the cores. A patent application filed by IBM, entitled “Method and syarstem for hypervisor based power management,” shows the company’s intention to use hypervisors for everything from monitoring power consumption rates to scaling power for individual core... » read more

Outsourcing’s New Face
By Ed Sperling - 29 Oct, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling As the semiconductor industry digs out from one of the worst downturns in decades, the business of semiconductor design and engineering is changing. While the architecture and features are still being developed by chip companies, the actual work of developing the chip increasingly is being done by third parties. Outsourcing is hardly new concept in business. In the early pa... » read more

Making Connections
By Ed Sperling - 28 Oct, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The world is still full of engineers who can build fast interconnects to things like PCI Express or USB 2.0 who can create complex schematics for determining the connections between a processor core, memory, logic and various IP blocks on a piece of silicon. But over the next several years, many of those engineers will have to figure out new ways to make a living. The numbe... » read more

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