Blog Review: March 19


ARM’s Diya Soubra has discovered an interesting term in relation to the Internet of Things: Compound Applications. Will that make the IoT more compelling? Mentor’s Colin Walls points to some less obvious reasons for choosing a processor. No. 4 on his list is particularly noteworthy. Synopsys’ Mick Posner has some thoughts about wearable computing prototypes. Check out the top pho... » read more

The Good Kind Of Regulation


This month I’m taking a page from the Editor’s book, (actually the title for the article here came from Ed Sperling) and I decided that the above title would be fitting for this article. Last September we took a look at IBM’s presentations on their POWER8 processor from HotChips. One of the multiple new interesting aspects of this design was the use of many on-chip integrated voltage regu... » read more

Fastest Computers On The Planet


The latest Green500 list (Excel spreadsheet here) was just released at the end of last month and heterogeneous systems now own the top of the list. The Top 10 systems all use a combination of Intel Xeon (mostly E5) processors paired with NVIDIA K20s. There are now 6 systems listed that have broken the 3,000 MFLOPS/W barrier and TSUBAME-KFC, belonging to the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s GSI... » read more

On-Chip MCUs Excel At Power Management


By Ann Steffora Mutschler When it comes to supplying power to an SoC, there is an increasing trend to make it more intelligent—how to control it more accurately, how it is monitored and how it communicates with different aspects of the chip. Traditional power supply models with analog supplies have less of this control, so a number of engineering teams are considering the use of on-chip m... » read more