Meeting Processor Performance And Safety Requirements For New ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Systems


By Fergus Casey and Srini Krishnaswami Innovation in today’s automotive industry is accelerating as companies race to be the market leader in safety and autonomous vehicles. With vehicle control moving from humans to the vehicles’ active safety systems, more sensors – cameras, radar, lidar, etc. – are being added to automotive systems. More sensors require more computational performa... » read more

Factoring 2048-bit RSA Integers in 177 Days with 13 436 Qubits and a Multimode Memory


Abstract: "We analyze the performance of a quantum computer architecture combining a small processor and a storage unit. By focusing on integer factorization, we show a reduction by several orders of magnitude of the number of processing qubits compared with a standard architecture using a planar grid of qubits with nearest-neighbor connectivity. This is achieved by taking advantage of a tem... » read more

What Is An xPU?


Almost every day there is an announcement about a new processor architecture, and it is given a three-letter acronym — TPU, IPU, NPU. But what really distinguishes them? Are there really that many unique processor architectures, or is something else happening? In 2018, John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson delivered the Turing lecture entitled, "A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture... » read more

High-Level Synthesis For RISC-V


High-quality RISC-V implementations are becoming more numerous, but it is the extensibility of the architecture that is driving a lot of design activity. The challenge is designing and implementing custom processors without having to re-implement them every time at the register transfer level (RTL). There are two types of high-level synthesis (HLS) that need to be considered. The first is ge... » read more

Customize Off-The-Shelf Processor IP


Processor customization is one approach to optimizing a processor IP core to handle a certain workload. In some case it makes sense to design a dedicated core from scratch, but in many cases an existing core may partially meet your requirements and can be a good starting point for your optimized core. In the past some processor IP vendors, notably ARC and Tensilica, offered extensible cores ... » read more

New Approaches For Processor Architectures


Processor vendors are starting to emphasize microarchitectural improvements and data movement over process node scaling, setting the stage for much bigger performance gains in devices that narrowly target what end users are trying to accomplish. The changes are a recognition that domain specificity, and the ability to adjust or adapt designs to unique workloads, are now the best way to impro... » read more

The Difference Between Processor Configuration And Customization


For many years, people have been talking about configuring processor IP cores, but especially with growing interest in the open RISC-V ISA, there is much more talk about customization. So, what is the difference? A simple analogy is to think of ordering a pizza. With most pizzerias, you have standard bases and a choice of toppings from a limited list. You can configure the pizza to the ... » read more

IChannels: Exploiting Current Management Mechanisms to Create Covert Channels in Modern Processors


Find technical paper link here. Abstract: "To operate efficiently across a wide range of workloads with varying power requirements, a modern processor applies different current management mechanisms, which briefly throttle instruction execution while they adjust voltage and frequency to accommodate for power-hungry instructions (PHIs) in the instruction stream. Doing so 1) reduces the pow... » read more

RISC-V Verification: The 5 Levels Of Simulation-Based Processor Hardware DV


By Lee Moore and Simon Davidmann The RISC-V open standard ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) offers developers the opportunity to configure the features and functions of a custom processor to uniquely address their target end application needs and requirements. RISC-V has a modular structure with many standard instruction extensions for additional dedicated hardware features such as Floating... » read more

Is RISC-V The Future?


Is RISC-V the future? This is a question that we often get asked, and let’s assume that we mean ‘is RISC-V going to be the dominant ISA in the processor market?’ This is certainly an unfolding situation and has changed significantly in the last five years. RISC-V originated at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010 and took a number of years to get traction with industry. A bi... » read more

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