Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have said “the rich are not like other people” to Ernest Hemingway (he didn’t). In the same way, processors are not like other blocks, and not because they have more gates (they don’t). However, special approaches to optimizing processors are important because the clock… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Debugging Verification Constraints
In his DAC keynote last year (2012) Mike Mueller of ARM compared how much CPU was required to verify the first ARM versus one of the latest ARM Cortex CPUs. Of course the newer CPU is hundreds of times larger than the first ARM but the amount of verification required was millions of times as much, requiring ARM to construct their own datacenter… Read More
The DSP is dead! Long Live the DSP… IP core!
Trying to trace DSP birth as a standard IC product, you come back to the early 80’s, when a certain Computer manufacturer named IBM has asked to a certain Semi-Conductor giant (at that time) named Texas Instruments if they could turn a lab concept, Digital Signal Processor, into a standard product that IBM could buy to TI, like they… Read More
CEVA and ARM Do LTE
If you have purchased a high-end cell-phone or tablet in the last couple of years it probably has LTE, although some carriers try and blur things by showing a symbol like 4G when you are in an area that has LTE despite the fact that your phone does not support it. Don’t you love cell-phone marketing? Talking of which, if a camel … Read More
Low Cost Smartphones: How Do They Do It For $50?
The future growth in smartphones is largely going to be at the low end of the market as Eric wrote about here a couple of weeks ago. A lot of that growth is targeted at China. Sitting in the US it is easy to underestimate the size of the Chinese market. China Mobile (the market leader) is just one company but has more than twice the number … Read More
Qualcomm Video Friday
Two videos (both short) from Qualcomm. They are both amusing but also have a serious aspect to them. The first one is interesting since it is Qualcomm following in Intel’s footsteps with its “Intel Inside” campaign against AMD to make people care about what processor was in their PC. Until that point probably… Read More
Intel’s Q2 Conference Call
Yesterday was Intel’s Q2 conference call. I think that there are some interesting little pieces of information. The financials were what analysts expected although they did take down their guidance for the rest of the year. But that is never the interesting point of Intel conference calls (they almost always hit guidance).… Read More
“NoC, NoC” – Are You Listening to nVidia’s Dally?
Recently Bill Dally, nVidia’s Chief Scientist & SVP of Research, and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University, has been out speaking quite a bit including a “short keynote” at the Design Automation Conference and a keynote at ISC 2013. The DAC audience is primarily EDA tool users and… Read More
Intel Benchmark Hoax!
To be fair, cheating on CPU benchmarks is not new, so if you haven’t followed the computer industry for the past 30 years you might be surprised by Intel cheating, but I’m certainly not. Back in the day I worked for Data General and we “creatively” benchmarked against the Digital Equipment VAX all day long. There are different types… Read More
How to reduce routing congestion in large Application Processor SoC?
Application Processor SoC integrates more and more functions, generation after generation, challenging performance, cost, power efficiency, reliability, and time-to-market. But the maximum die size can’t increase, at least because of the constraints linked with wafer production, manufacturability, yield and finally… Read More
RISC-V Virtualization and the Complexity of MMUs