Neural nets are hot these days. In this forum certainly you can’t swing a cat without hitting multiple articles on the topic – I’ve written some myself. For me there are two reasons for this interest. First, neural nets are amazingly successful at what they do, for example in image recognition where they can beat… Read More
Qualcomm’s New Smartphone Chips Go Straight At MediaTek
Last Thursday at Qualcomm’s Financial Analyst Day the company made a slew of chip announcements ranging from the industry’s 1 Gbps wireless LTE modem to a custom designed smartwatch SoC and platform called “Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC”. In between those, Qualcomm also announced a few very overlooked … Read More
Cadence loads up on MACs for vision with CNNs
For vision DSP IP running convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a big driver of performance is increasing the bits processed per cycle with parallel MACs. Tom Simon did a great job in recent posts of introducing CNNs at a high level, so I’ll look at what is architecturally behind Cadence’s latest announcement: the Tensilica Vision… Read More
Qualcomm’s New X16 LTE Modem Delivers Gigabit LTE And A Scalable Architecture
Qualcomm has been the global unit and revenue market share leader for years in modem technologies used in smartphones, tablets, PCs and IoT (Internet of Things). One of the reasons they have maintained this lead for so long is that they are typically first to market with new generations of modems. Today at their investor conference,… Read More
Intel And Qualcomm Partner (Yes, Really)
For the longest time, the 802.11ad space, also known as WiGig by others, was a conglomeration of different 60 GHz Wi-Fi technologies. There have been many companies that have announced technologies utilizing 60 GHz Wi-Fi technologies including Intel, Nitero, Peraso, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and SiBEAM. Even though many… Read More
Book Review Mobile Unleashed The History of ARM
After having taken a closer look at x86 processor with “Inside The Machine” I came across “Mobile Unleashed“, a book about the history of a non-Silicon Valley company and technology for a change that has significantly shaped the world of computing as we know it today: ARM.
Written by Daniel Nenni and Don Dingee the book tells the story… Read More
Mobile Unleashed…Reviewed
I finished reading Don Dingee and Dan Nenni’s book, Mobile Unleashed, the Origin and Evolution of ARM Processors in Our Devices. I guess by way of disclosure I should say that Don and Dan both blogged with me here on SemiWiki for several years before I joined Cadence, and Dan’s last book Fabless was co-authored with me… Read More
GM in the Middle of Mobility Muddle
General Motors has made a flurry of announcements around its Maven mobility brand for car sharing and its investment in Lyft. The latest news, first reported by re/code, is that Lyft and Maven will be rolling out a short-term rental program for Lyft drivers to use Chevy Equinoxes in Chicago later this month. The program is called … Read More
What if this is as good as the iPhone gets?
How do I write about Apple so well? “I think of Steve Jobs, and I take away vision and creativity.” Please recognize that is a bit tongue in cheek, but I do think we are at a turning point where Apple is having a very hard time moving its loyal customers toward continued upgrades, and it is forcing them into unusual compromises.… Read More
Qualcomm Rounds Out IoT Offerings
Lots of chip companies like ARM Holdings, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm are spending time and effort to find a place for themselves in the IoT market because they, like I, believe in a gigantic, future market. Some companies are focusing on wearables and drones while others are looking to automotive and smart home. Qualcomm previously… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay