Demand For Timing Innovation Grows


The semiconductor industry has begun exploring a range of timing options as demand for increased performance and more features exceeds the ability to design chips using the same techniques and technology that have been relied on for decades. Like many elements in computing, timing is a hierarchy or stack. It includes everything from partitioning AI computations into multiple parts and assemb... » read more

Supercomputing Efficiency Lags Performance Gains


In last month’s article, Top 500: Frontier is Still on Top, I wrote about the latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists. Power is an incredibly important aspect of designing a world performance leading supercomputer. (Why, I can remember back to when you could run the world’s fastest machine on only a couple MW of power.) The first Green500 list was published back in 2013. Happy 1... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Intel released Tunnel Falls, its newest quantum research chip, to quantum computing researchers interested in using the 12-qubit silicon chip for their own experiments and research.  Intel is also providing the chips to research laboratories, with help from LQC (LPS Qubit Collaboratory) through the Army Research Office. The first labs to receive the chip are LPS, Sandia National Laboratories, ... » read more

Mitigating Voltage Droop


Voltage droop, also known as IR drop, is a phenomenon that occurs when the current in the power delivery network abruptly changes due to workload fluctuations. This can lead to supply voltage drops across system-on-chips (SoCs) which can cause severe performance degradation, limit their energy efficiency, and in extreme cases can cause catastrophic timing failures. To avoid these issues, conven... » read more

Top500: Frontier Is Still On Top


The latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists were just released on May 22, 2023. The last time that I wrote about the Green500, a Chinese machine, NRCPC’s Sunway TaihuLight, was sitting at the top of the Top500 list. It’s been a while since I last wrote about these lists and it’s interesting to look back at the leap in performance and energy efficiency over the past 7 years. ... » read more

TSMC Targets N2 Production For 2025


April ended with TSMC’s financial results for the 1st Quarter of 2023 reported on April 20, 2023, and their North American Technology Symposium was held on April 27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. TSMC’s N3 entered volume production in 4Q 2022 and TSMC’s N2 “nanosheet” technology is on schedule for production in 2025. TSMC’s CEO, C.C. Wei, said during the 1Q conference cal... » read more

Squeezing The Margins


Back in 2016, we looked at the MediaTek Helio X20, the first Tri-Gear mobile SoC. Tri-Gear is a step beyond ARM’s big.LITTLE concept of using two different cores that have unique power and performance characteristics, by adding a third core. The main advantage to this approach is having more core choices to best run workloads at better energy efficiency and performance operating points. At... » read more

How To Build Resilience Into Chips


Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for continued improvements in performance and power, but it's also contributing to unusual and often unpredictable errors in hardware that are extremely difficult to find. The sources of those errors can include anything from timing errors in a particular sequence, to gaps in bonds between chi... » read more

Chip Design Shifts As Fundamental Laws Run Out Of Steam


Dennard scaling is gone, Amdahl's Law is reaching its limit, and Moore's Law is becoming difficult and expensive to follow, particularly as power and performance benefits diminish. And while none of that has reduced opportunities for much faster, lower-power chips, it has significantly shifted the dynamics for their design and manufacturing. Rather than just different process nodes and half ... » read more

Bespoke Silicon Rattles Chip Design Ecosystem


Bespoke silicon developers are shaking up relationships, priorities, and methodologies across the semiconductor industry, creating demand for skills that cross traditional boundaries, and driving new business models that leverage these enormous investments. Bespoke silicon designers today are a rare breed, capable of understanding the unique requirements of a specific domain, as well as a gr... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →