A VIP to Accelerate Verification for Hyperscalar Caching

A VIP to Accelerate Verification for Hyperscalar Caching
by Bernard Murphy on 12-18-2019 at 6:00 am

NVMe

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


Autonomous Driving Still Terra Incognita

Autonomous Driving Still Terra Incognita
by Bernard Murphy on 12-12-2019 at 6:00 am

Whither self-driving?

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

The First Must-Have in 5G
by Bernard Murphy on 12-11-2019 at 6:00 am

Bulk acoustic wave filter

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

Arm Inches Closer to Supercomputing
by Bernard Murphy on 12-04-2019 at 6:00 am

Summit supercomputer

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

MEMS Actuation and the Art of Prototyping
by Bernard Murphy on 11-27-2019 at 5:00 am

Thermal actuator 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

NXP Pushes GHz Performance in Crossover MCU
by Bernard Murphy on 11-20-2019 at 6:00 am

RT1170 system

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

Evolving Landscape of Self-Driving Safety Standards
by Bernard Murphy on 11-14-2019 at 5:00 am

Autonomous Vehicle

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

A No-Fudge ML Architecture for Arm
by Bernard Murphy on 11-12-2019 at 5:00 am

Ethos applications

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

ReRAM Revisited
by Bernard Murphy on 11-06-2019 at 6:00 am

Memory

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

Arm Reveals Custom Instructions, Mbed Partner Governance
by Bernard Murphy on 10-30-2019 at 6:00 am

Tipping the scale

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