Non-volatile memory (NVM) is finding new roles in datacenters, not currently so much in “cold storage” as a replacement for hard disk drives, but definitely in “warm storage”. Warm storage applications target an increasing number of functions requiring access to databases with much lower latency than is possible through paths… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
Autonomous Driving Still Terra Incognita
I already posted on one automotive panel at this year’s Arm TechCon. A second I attended was a more open-ended discussion on where we’re really at in autonomous driving. Most of you probably agree we’ve passed the peak of the hype curve and are now into the long slog of trying to connect hope to reality. There are a lot of challenges, … Read More
The First Must-Have in 5G
If I was asked about must-have needs for 5G, I’d probably talk about massive MIMO and a lot of exotic parallel DSP processing, also perhaps need for new intelligent approaches to link adaptation and intelligent network slicing in the infrastructure. But there’s something that comes before that all that digital cleverness, in … Read More
Arm Inches Closer to Supercomputing
When it comes to Arm, we think mostly of phones and the “things” in the IoT. We know they’re in a lot of other places too, such as communications infrastructure but that’s a kind of diffuse image – “yeah, they’re everywhere”. We like easy-to-understand targets: phones, IoT devices, we get those. More recently Arm started to talk about… Read More
MEMS Actuation and the Art of Prototyping
I mentioned a while back that I’m really getting into the role that sensors play in our new hyper-connected world – in the IoT, intelligent cars, homes, cities, industry, utilities, medicine, agriculture, etc, etc. If we can think of a way to sense it and connect it, someone is probably already doing it. But there’s more to … Read More
NXP Pushes GHz Performance in Crossover MCU
I first heard about NXP crossover MCUs at the 2017 TechCon. I got another update at this year’s TechCon, this time their progress on performance and capability in this family. They’ve been ramping performance – a lot – now to a gigahertz, based on a dual-core architecture, M7 and M4. They position this as between 2 and 9X faster than… Read More
Evolving Landscape of Self-Driving Safety Standards
I sat in a couple of panels at Arm TechCon this year, the first on how safety is evolving for platform-based architectures with a mix of safety-aware IP and the second on lessons learned in safety and particularly how the industry and standards are adapting to the larger challenges in self-driving, which obviously extend beyond … Read More
A No-Fudge ML Architecture for Arm
At TechCon I had a 1×1 with Steve Roddy, VP of product marketing in the Machine Learning (ML) Group at Arm. I wanted to learn more about their ML direction since I previously felt that, amid a sea of special ML architectures from everyone else, they were somewhat fudging their position in this space. What I heard earlier was that… Read More
ReRAM Revisited
I met with Sylvain Dubois (VP BizDev and Marketing of Crossbar) at TechCon to get an update on his views on ReRAM technology. I’m really not a semiconductor process guy so I’m sure I’m slower than the experts to revelations in this area. But I do care about applications so I hope I can add an app spin on the topic, also Sylvain’s views on… Read More
Arm Reveals Custom Instructions, Mbed Partner Governance
At TechCon Arm announced two more advances against competitive threats, one arguably tactical and the other strategic, at least in this writer’s view. The tactical move was to add support for custom instructions, the ability to collapse multiple instructions into a single instruction through customer-added logic which hooks… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay