Power/Performance Bits: April 13


Speedy data transfer Researchers from MIT, Intel, and Raytheon developed a new data transfer system that both boosts speeds and reduces energy use by taking elements from both traditional copper cables and fiber optics. "There's an explosion in the amount of information being shared between computer chips -- cloud computing, the internet, big data. And a lot of this happens over conventiona... » read more

Network Interface Card Evolution


Longer chip lifetimes, more data to process and move, and a slowdown in the rate of processor improvements has created a series of constantly shifting bottlenecks. Kartik Srinivasan, director of data center marketing at Xilinx, looks at one of those bottlenecks, the network interface card, why continuous enhancements and changes will be required, and how to extend the life of NICs as the networ... » read more

Usage Models Driving Data Center Architecture Changes


Data center architectures are undergoing a significant change, fueled by more data and much greater usage from remote locations. Part of this shift involves the need to move some processing closer to the various memory hierarchies, from SRAM to DRAM to storage. There is more data to process, and it takes less energy and time to process that data in place. But workloads also are being distrib... » read more

Virtual Verification Of Computational Storage Devices


Over recent years, there has been a move to replace hard-disk drive (HDD) storage with solid-state drive (SSD) storage. SDDs are faster, contain no moving parts that can fail or be affected by environmental hazards, and the cost of SSDs has been dropping each year. Unfortunately, the verification of an SSD is quite complex. In particular because of hyperscale datacenter enterprise and client-dr... » read more

Moving Data And Computing Closer Together


The speed of processors has increased to the point where they often are no longer the performance bottleneck for many systems. It's now about data access. Moving data around costs both time and power, and developers are looking for ways to reduce the distances that data has to move. That means bringing data and memory nearer to each other. “Hard drives didn't have enough data flow to cr... » read more

The Great Data Flood Ahead


The number of devices connected to the Internet is expected to exceed 1 trillion devices over the next decade or so. The timeline is a bit fuzzy, in part because no one is actually counting all of these devices, but the implications are pretty clear. A data deluge of biblical proportions is headed our way, and so far no one has any idea of what to do with all of it. From a system-level s... » read more

Chiplets, Faster Interconnects, More Efficiency


Big chipmakers are turning to architectural improvements such as chiplets, faster throughput both on-chip and off-chip, and concentrating more work per operation or cycle, in order to ramp up processing speeds and efficiency. Taken as a whole, this represents a significant shift in direction for the major chip companies. All of them are wrestling with massive increases in processing demands ... » read more

Smart NiCs


Manish Sinha, strategic planning for marketing and business at Achronix, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about what’s changing in networking interface cards, how to get more performance out of these devices, and how much needs to be in hardware versus software. » read more

New Challenges For Data Centers


Rita Horner, senior technical marketing manager in Synopsys’ Solutions Group, looks at the impact of a significant rise in data, why this often leads to big cost increases, and where the bottlenecks are occurring. » read more

Compute And AI In Next-Generation SSD Designs


Over the last 40 years digital storage has advanced at an amazing rate. Because it operates out of sight digital storage tends to be taken for granted, but today there is more storage capacity in the devices in our pockets than what existed in mainframe computers 30 years ago. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) this trend will continue and the results will be nothing less than astoun... » read more

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