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Intel’s Ivy Bridge Mopping Up Campaign

Intel’s Ivy Bridge Mopping Up Campaign
by Ed McKernan on 04-26-2012 at 9:03 pm

In every Intel product announcement and PR event, there are hours of behind the scenes meetings to discuss what they should introduce, what are the messages and what are the effects on the marketplace to maximize the impact of the moment. The Ivy Bridge product release speaks volumes of what they want to accomplish over the coming… Read More


Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out?

Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out?
by Paul McLellan on 04-26-2012 at 9:00 pm

Do you need more servers? Do you need more licenses? If you are kicking off a verification run of 10,000 jobs on 1,000 server cores then you are short of 9000 cores and 9000 licenses, but you’d be insane to rush out with a purchase order just on that basis. Maybe verification isn’t even on the critical path for your design,… Read More


TSMC 28nm Beats Q1 2012 Expectations!

TSMC 28nm Beats Q1 2012 Expectations!
by Daniel Nenni on 04-26-2012 at 9:00 am

TSMC just finished theQ1 conference call. I will let the experts haggle over the wording of the financial analysis, but the big news is that TSMC 28nm Q1 revenue was 5%, beating my guess of 4%. So all of you who bet against TSMC 28nm it’s time to pay up! Coincidentally, I’m in Las Vegas where the term deadbeat is taken literally!

Per my … Read More


Non Volatile Memory IP: a 100% reliable, anti fuse solution from Novocell Semiconductor

Non Volatile Memory IP: a 100% reliable, anti fuse solution from Novocell Semiconductor
by Eric Esteve on 04-25-2012 at 9:36 am

In this pretty shaky NVM IP market, where articles frequently mention legal battles rather than product features, it seems interesting to look at Novocell Semiconductor and their NVM IP product offering, and try to figure out what makes these products specific, what are the differentiators. Before looking at SmartBit cell into… Read More


Mentor’s New Emulator

Mentor’s New Emulator
by Paul McLellan on 04-25-2012 at 8:00 am

Mentor announced the latest version of their Veloce emulator at the Globalpress briefing in Santa Cruz. The announcement is in two parts. The first is that they have designed a new custom chip with twice the performance and twice the capacity. It supports up to two billion gate designs and many software engineers. Surprisingly … Read More


Fast buses at DAC

Fast buses at DAC
by Paul McLellan on 04-24-2012 at 10:05 pm

UPDATE: there is free WiFi on all buses.

OK, these are not the 128 bit 1GHz buses we have to hear about every day. They go roughly 40 miles in roughly an hour. But they take you from Silicon Valley to DAC and back, and they are cheaper than BART or Caltrain.

For the first time this year, DAC has buses from Silicon Valley to Moscone for DAC. … Read More


Audio, not your father’s MP3

Audio, not your father’s MP3
by Paul McLellan on 04-24-2012 at 9:26 pm

Chris Rowen, Tensilica’s CTO, presented in Santa Cruz at the Globalpress briefing. He was basically presenting Tensilica’s audio strategy, which I’ve written about before. But he provided an interesting perspective. Globalpress (which flies journalists in from all over the world and then fills the few… Read More


Smart mobile SoCs: Texas Instruments

Smart mobile SoCs: Texas Instruments
by Don Dingee on 04-24-2012 at 9:00 pm

TI has parlayed its heritage in digital signal processing and long-term relationships with mobile device makers into a leadership position in mobile SoCs. They boast a relatively huge portfolio of design wins thanks to being the launch platform for Android 4.0. On the horizon, the next generation OMAP 5 could change the entire… Read More


Broadcom announces an HFC

Broadcom announces an HFC
by Paul McLellan on 04-24-2012 at 8:00 pm

For a long time Cisco had a very high end product whose official internal name during its years of development was HFR, which stood for Huge F***ing Router (the marketing department insisted it stood for ‘fast’). Eventually it got given a product number, CRS-1, but not before I’d read an article about it in the… Read More


TSMC versus Intel at 20nm!

TSMC versus Intel at 20nm!
by Daniel Nenni on 04-24-2012 at 7:00 pm

The biggest news out of the TSMC Symposium last week was the 20nm update. Lots of debate and speculation, just why is TSMC releasing one version of 20nm (20nm SoC) versus multiple versions like in 40nm (LP, G, LPG) and 28nm (HP, HPM, HPL, LP)? Here are my thoughts, I would also be interested in your feedback in the comment section. This… Read More