You may not know Tensilica DSP IP core, but you probably use Tensilica DSP powered systems in your day to day life. Every year, over 2 billion DSP cores equip IC in thousands of designs supporting IoT, Mobile Phones, Storage/SSD, Networking, Video, Security, Cameras… and more. Why DSP processing, the foundation of all Tensilica… Read More
It used to be that if you went to a processor conference, you could expect to spend hours listening to talks about pipelining, cache schemes and processor architecture. Well, I went to the Linley Processor Conference this week in Santa Clara and found the topics pretty compelling. Processors are in just about everything. It is easier… Read More
In more than 30 years of semiconductors, we have seen many technology-induced disruptions in our ecosystem, be it healthcare, consumer, mobile, aerospace, or any other field for that matter. To name a few are portable healthcare devices at much lower prices, video conferencing over internet that reduced the need of physical … Read More
You should be happy to listen that Intel will buy Altera FPGA challenger, if you expect always more power to be consumed in datacenter! In 2013 the power consumption linked with the Servers and Storage IC activity, plus the electricity consumed in the systems cooling these high performance chips has reached 91 BILLION KWh (or the… Read More
Does the evil sounding phenomenon known as Dark Silicon create a big opportunity for FPGA vendors as was predicted recently by Pacific Crest Securities? John Vinh posits that using multiple cores as a method of scaling throughput is flattening out, and the use of FPGA’s to perform computation can help off-load and thus overcome… Read More
If we look back in the last century, performance and area were two main criteria for semiconductor chip design. All design tools and flows were concentrated towards optimizing those two aspects. As a result, density of chips started increasing and power became a critical factor. Now, Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are looked… Read More
FPGAs in many ways are still a bit mysterious to some folk. I was at a high level summit in April, and I realized that many there had no idea what an FPGA was. They knew at least what a CPU was or meant and that their kids talk about GPUs. A good analogy I have for an FPGA when compared to a CPU is something like this. Think of the FPGA and CPU as … Read More
Imagination seems to be well known for a couple of things. Firstly, everyone knows that it is the graphics processor used in the iPhone and the iPad and lots of other phones. And they know that Imagination acquired MIPS at the start of this year.
But what people don’t seem to really appreciate is just what a huge portfolio of IP… Read More
Silicon dominates our lives, CPU’s, GPU’s are in the limelight but the unsung hero is the FPGA. They simply do the work where other silicon dare not tread, as they are unfit for the task. Never send a boy to do a man’s job.
For a moment, if we can, just for a few minutes perhaps we can break away from the social media bubble… Read More
How do you benchmark a processor? It seems like it should be easy, just run some code and see how fast it is. Traditionally processors were indeed benchmarked by raw performance like GMACS, GFLOPS, memory bandwidth and so on. But in today’s world where systems have become very complex and applications very compute intensive, the… Read More
