Why This Roadmap Matters


The semiconductor industry is now officially looking beyond PCs and servers, establishing metrics and guidance for existing and developing market segments rather than just focusing on how to get to the next process nodes. The IEEE's International Roadmap for Devices and Systems marks a fundamental shift in the industry. The uncertainty that has ensued ever since the introduction of 3D transi... » read more

2026: I Can Only Imagine…


It was fun to see all of the new products that were rolled out this year at CES. It got me thinking about how much technology has advanced in the past 10 years. In 2006, the iPhone was still a year away from being introduced and we hadn’t discovered tablets yet. The Internet wasn’t mobile and the cloud was still something in the sky. Never mind Fitbits, smart watches, augmented reality or a... » read more

Remove The Bus From Your Embedded System


For many years, the 8-bit microcontroller has been the workhorse of embedded systems. Design teams favor the size and power benefits that a tightly coupled processor, such as the 8051 microcontroller, brings to their designs. The compact and ultra-low power 8-bit architecture improves battery life and reduces bill-of-material costs. However, embedded systems increasingly require higher perfo... » read more

Are More Processor Cores Better?


Up until the early 2000s, each generation of processor was faster, used more exotic architectures, had deeper pipelines, used more transistors, ran at higher clock frequencies and consumed more power. In fact power was rising faster than performance and led to the extrapolation that within a few generations, processors would run as hot as nuclear reactors. Something had to change, and that c... » read more

The Multicore Processing Conundrum


We drive relentlessly into our technological future and often it seems like we’re upgrading our high-performance vehicle as it speeds forward. That’s no easy task, to be sure. We were roaring along fine, observing Moore’s Law, and then we hit a speed bump. So design teams quickly adopted multi-core designs to compensate for the fact that pushing up speeds on single-core CPUs was a melt... » read more

A Decade At The Ceiling


This month marks the tenth anniversary of the introduction of the Intel Pentium 4 HT 570J, which had an advertised operating frequency of 3.8 GHz. It was manufactured in a 90nm process, had a VID voltage range of 1.2V-1.425V and was rated at 115W TDP. In a previous article, Power to Fly, we looked at the graph that I’m including again here below for reference. The microprocessor indu... » read more

Making Chips Run Faster


For all the talk about low power, the real focus of most chipmakers is still performance. The reality is that OEMs might be willing to sacrifice increasing performance for longer battery life, but they will rarely lower performance to reach that goal. This is more obvious for some applications than others. A machine monitor probably isn’t the place where performance will make much of a dif... » read more

GPUs Dominate (Again) The Green500 List


The Green500 has released its latest list of the top 500 most energy-efficient Supercomputers. The top 17 are heterogeneous systems (systems that use more than one type of processor), with the top 15 systems all using NVIDIA Kepler K20 GPUs paired with Intel Xeon CPUs. Still at the top of the list is the Tokyo Institute of Technology GSIC Center’s TSUBAME-KFC, an oil-cooled Kepler powered ... » read more

Server Memory: What Drives Its Growth?


I was recently reading several analyst reports that came out after the end of last quarter, and one caught my eye: "Gartner says Worldwide Server Shipments Grew 1.4%..." It caused me to wonder, how is it possible that server shipments only grow at modest rates, while the DRAM used in those servers is growing at significantly higher rates? Putting my search engine to use, I found a series of ... » read more

Does IoT Change Design?


Over the past few months, and especially at DAC, I have been struck by the amount of interest in IoT and its impact on semiconductor design. In this post I will look at how IoT impacts the life of system designers — and explore if it really changes anything. Important source of semiconductor growth IoT is clearly important to investors, semiconductor makers, IP and EDA because it expands ... » read more

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