Carbon Design Systems celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. It is a celebration that the company has survived a decade but also bittersweet that the company hasn’t been acquired for a juicy premium. But we just have to accept that EDA is not a business where you can throw together a company in 18 months and sell it for $1B… Read More
I went to part of the Linley Tech Mobile Conference. This is the current incarnation of what started life as Michael Slater’s Microprocessor Report, and the twice-yearly Microprocessor Forum. These very technical analysis organizations seem to work well when they are a small group of analysts working together to cover… Read More
I wrote on Monday about ARM’s Processor Optimization Packs (POPs). In Japan they announced yesterday the Seahawk hard macro implementation in the TSMC 28HPM process. It is the highest performance ARM to date, running at over 2GHz. It is a quad-core Cortex A15.
The hard macro was developed using ARM Artisan 12-track libraries… Read More
Just in time for TSMC’s technology symposium (tomorrow) ARM have announced a whole portfolio of new Processor Optimization Packs (POPs) for TSMC 40nm and 28nm. For most people, me included, my first question was ‘What is a POP?’
A POP is three things:
You have probably heard something about ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. This links a Cortex-A15 multi-core CPU with a Cortex-A7 CPU. The A15 is a high-performance processor and the A7 is a very low power processor. The basic idea is that when high-performance is required (playing a graphical video game on your smartphone,… Read More
As I mentioned in my previous blog “NVIDIA Claims TSMC 20nm will not Scale?” Jen-Hsun Huang is a very entertaining guy. I always listen to the NVIDIA conference calls because you never know what he will say next. Clearly he is a smart guy so you have to ask yourself why all the rhetoric?
In the Forbes article NVIDIA: Intel should let us… Read More
Keynote #2 at SNUG 2012 was John Cornish, VP Marketing at ARM. Why they sent a marketing person to speak in front of 2,000+ engineers I do not know. To top that, next time they should send a sales person and do a real dog and pony show. To find out more about John I checked his LinkedIn profile which was bare. So enough about John, lets hit … Read More
Sometime early in 2013, Intel will tape out its first production chip for 14nm and it won’t be an x86 processor. It’s neither necessary nor prudent to lead with a new x86 processor when the one missing element that the mobile market desperately needs is nowhere to be found: an ultra low power 4G LTE chip that fits under the battery… Read More
There were three keynotes at CDNLive this morning, and one theme ran through them: collaboration. In fact there was one specific instance of collaboration that all three people mentioned. Taping out an ARM Cortex-A15 in TSMC 20nm technology using a Cadence tool flow.
Lip-Bu, Cadence’s CEO, went first. He had some numbers… Read More
After the introduction of the NEWiPAD, Apple has placed itself just two short steps away from dominating the computer market – including PCs. One step, which is widely reported, is a smaller iPAD with an 8” screen that aims for a $299 price point. Amazon will take the rest of the market under $299. The second step is purely speculation… Read More
