Apple and Samsung Do It Again

Apple and Samsung Do It Again
by Paul McLellan on 02-07-2013 at 11:54 pm

The numbers are starting to come in for how everyone did in Q4. According to Cannacord Genuity, Apple made 69% of the profit and Samsung made 34%. What do you notice about those numbers? They add up to more than 100%. HTC supposedly made 1% of the profit and everyone else either broke even or lost money. Basically Apple and Samsung have… Read More


ARMs in the Clouds

ARMs in the Clouds
by Paul McLellan on 02-07-2013 at 7:10 pm

The most interesting session at the Linley Tech Data Center Conference last week was the last one, on Designing Power Efficient Servers. What this was really about was whether ARM would have any success in the server market and what Intel’s response might be.

Datacenters are now very focused on power efficiency and many track… Read More


Software Driven Power Analysis

Software Driven Power Analysis
by Paul McLellan on 02-03-2013 at 8:15 pm

Power is a fundamentally hard problem. When you have finished the design, you have accurate power numbers but can’t do anything about them. At the RTL level you have some power information but it is often too late to make major architectural changes (add an offload audio-processor, for example). Early in the design, making… Read More


Common Platform Technology Forum February 5th 2013 Live or Online!

Common Platform Technology Forum February 5th 2013 Live or Online!
by Daniel Nenni on 02-03-2013 at 8:00 am

Can’t make it to Santa Clara? Join us online!

The detailed 2013 CPTF agenda is now up in preparation for the February 5th event at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This is one of the rare times that you can get a free lunch! Watch this quick video to see what is in store for us this year. Dr. Paul McLellan and I will be there so please… Read More


High Performance or Cycle Accuracy? You can have both

High Performance or Cycle Accuracy? You can have both
by Daniel Payne on 01-26-2013 at 10:55 pm

SoC designers have always wanted to simulate hardware and software together during new product development, so one practical question has been how to trade off performance versus accuracy when creating an early model of the hardware. The creative minds at Carbon Design Systems and ARM have combined to offer us some hope and relief… Read More


Apple Makes More on iPhone Than Samsung on Everything

Apple Makes More on iPhone Than Samsung on Everything
by Paul McLellan on 01-25-2013 at 1:39 pm

Apple’s stock is down 10% after they announced “disappointing” results. They are only disappointing in the sense that some analysts expected even bigger profits. At $13.08 billion it is the largest quarterly profit for any corporation that is not in the oil business ever. According to wikipedia, even the … Read More


The Linley Microprocessor Conference: Weather Cloudy

The Linley Microprocessor Conference: Weather Cloudy
by Paul McLellan on 01-23-2013 at 7:51 pm

The Linley Group’s Microprocessor conference in Spring is focused on Datacenters now that cloud computing and massive internal datacenters has made them so important. The conference is on February 5th and 6th. It is free to qualified people such as network equipment vendors, network service providers and so on (which … Read More


Tech Forum, February 5, features 32/28-, 20-, 14-, and 10-nanometer processes

Tech Forum, February 5, features 32/28-, 20-, 14-, and 10-nanometer processes
by Daniel Nenni on 01-04-2013 at 7:00 pm

The Common Platform Alliance — IBM, Samsung Electronics, Co., Ltd., and GLOBALFOUNDRIES — continues to redefine the landscape of the semiconductor industry with its groundbreaking collaboration. Join us at our 2013 Common Platform Technology Forumon Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center as we showcaseRead More


Formal Verification at ARM

Formal Verification at ARM
by Paul McLellan on 12-20-2012 at 4:34 pm

There are two primary microprocessor companies in the world these days: Intel and ARM. Of course there are many others but Intel is dominant on the PC desktop (including Macs) and ARM is dominant in mobile (including tablets).

One of the keynotes at last month’s Jasper User Group (JUG, not the greatest of acronyms) was by Bob… Read More


Cortex-A9 speed limits and PPA optimization

Cortex-A9 speed limits and PPA optimization
by Don Dingee on 12-19-2012 at 3:01 pm

We know by now that clock speeds aren’t everything when it comes to measuring the goodness of a processor. Performance has direct ties to pipeline and interconnect details, power factors into considerations of usability, and the unspoken terms of yield drive cost.

My curiosity kicked in when I looked at the recent press release… Read More