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
Artificial Intelligence
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
Rapid growth of AI/ML based systems requires memory and interconnect IP
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are working their way into a surprising number of areas. Probably the one you think of first is autonomous driving, but we are seeing a rapidly growing number of other applications as time goes on. Among these are networking, sensor fusion, manufacturing, data mining, numerical… 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
BittWare PCIe server card employs high throughput AI/ML optimized 7nm FPGA
Back in May I wrote an article on the new Speedster7t from Achronix. This chip brings together Network on Chip (NoC) interconnect, high speed Ethernet and memory connections, and processing elements optimized for AI/ML. Speedster7t is a very exciting new FPGA that can be used effectively to accelerate a wide range of processing… Read More
Virtualizing 5G Infrastructure Verification
Mentor have pushed the advantages of virtualized verification in a number of domains, initially in verifying advanced networking devices supporting multiple protocols and software-defined networking (SDN), and more recently for SSD controllers, particularly in large storage systems for data centers. There are two important… Read More
How Should I Cache Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
Caching intent largely hasn’t changed since we started using the concept – to reduce average latency in memory accesses and to reduce average power consumption in off-chip reads and writes. The architecture started out simple enough, a small memory close to a processor, holding most-recently accessed instructions and data … Read More
Glasses and Open Architecture for Computer Vision
You know that AI can now look at an image and detect significant objects like a pedestrian or a nearby car. But had you thought about a need for corrective lenses or other vision aids? Does AI vision decay over time, like ours, so that it needs increasing help to read prescription labels and identify road signs at a distance?
In fact no.… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet