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
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Characteristics of an Efficient Inference Processor
The market opportunities for machine learning hardware are becoming more succinct, with the following (rather broad) categories emerging:
- Model training: models are evaluated at the “hyperscale” data center; utilizing either general purpose processors or specialized hardware, with typical numeric precision of 32-bit
New Generation of FPGA Based Distributed Accelerator Cards Offer High Performance and Adaptability
We have learned from nature that two characteristics are helpful for success, diversity and adaptability. The same has been shown to be true for computing systems. Things have come a long way from when CPU centric computing was the only choice. Much heavy lifting these days is done by GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs, with CPUs in a support … 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
Intel vs AMD vs Google vs Amazon vs NUVIA
Arguably the cloud was the quickest road to riches for chip designers large and small. As an emerging company, if you wanted to raise money just put “Datacenter” in your pitch deck and you were assured millions. You would be competing with semiconductor’s version of David and Goliath (AMD and Intel) but that was a good thing, right?… Read More
MIPI gaining traction in vehicle ADAS and ADS
I am old enough to remember when cars did not come with air conditioning unless you purchased it as an option. Of course, now you can’t even find a car that doesn’t come with air conditioning. So, it goes with Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). They are becoming more and more common and will certainly become baseline features… Read More
SiFive is Teaming with Many of the Most Prestigious Universities in South America to Engage Academia in the RISC-V Ecosystem!
We’re confirming seats in São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Bucaramanga for the South American leg of our worldwide 2019 SiFive Tech Symposiums and Workshops. These five events will be focused heavily on academia, which is a key focus for SiFive. In fact, we are co-hosting these events with many of the most prestigious… 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
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet