tag: Intel

From Multicore To Many-Core
By Ed Sperling - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Future SoCs will move from multiple cores—typically two to four in a high-power processor—to dozens of cores. But answers are only beginning to emerge as to where and how those cores will be deployed and how they will be accessed. Just as Moore’s Law forced a move to multicore architectures inside a single processor because of leakage at higher frequencies, it will begi... » read more

Storm Before The Calm
By Ed Sperling - 17 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

The announcements out of ARM and Intel over the past couple week—and presumably from rivals AMD, MIPS and even Nvidia in coming weeks—are more than just a struggle for one-upmanship. The goal is much more far-reaching and the stakes are significantly higher than who has the fastest processor or core or even the lowest-power version. In the past year there has been a massive push to expan... » read more

The Shape Of Things To Come
By Ed Sperling - 26 Aug, 2010 - Comments: 0

By David Lammers Tall or thin? That is the question facing semiconductor companies, now reaching an “intense” phase in development of the vertical finFET and planar ETSOI (extra thin silicon on insulator) transistors for the 22/20nm and 15/14nm technology generations. “This is a conservative industry,” said Raj Jammy, vice president of materials and emerging technologies at Sematech... » read more

Betting On 3D
By Ed Sperling - 26 Aug, 2010 - Comments: 0

The continuation of Moore’s Law appears less in doubt than ever. Companies such as Intel, ST, AMD (via GlobalFoundries) and IBM are testing FinFETS and ETSOI and work is being done on the back end to ensure that these new structures can be manufactured with sufficient yield. What’s changed, though, is the resistance by other companies to the progression of Moore’s Law. There is no long... » read more

Power Or Performance?
By Ed Sperling - 10 Jun, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Most microprocessors have shifted to new small geometry processes in order to be the most efficient at power and high performance. However there is always a trade-off between power, performance and area (PPA) for semiconductors, and this is especially relevant for processors. In the current design space, processors are created as general-purpose products, but they are gene... » read more

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

Energy Star Meets Data Security
By Ed Sperling - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Security technology and low power typically don’t go together in the same sentence, let alone the same device. All of that is starting to change, though. With 2% of the world’s energy being consumed by data centers, the new Energy Star guidelines and their associated tax incentives have been driving IT updates and upgrades since 2009 . The security industry is n... » 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

Apple’s Re-aggregation Anomaly
By Ed Sperling - 28 Jan, 2010 - Comments: 0

Apple’s new iPad is an interesting device not so much because of what it offers to consumers—that’s certainly interesting in its own right—but because of how Apple built the device and why. Apple has been scouring the market for seasoned semiconductor engineers of late. The process started two years ago when the company hired a team of former engineers from the late Digital Equipme... » read more

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