All Things Semiconductor!
One of the great pleasures in what I do is to work with people who are working with people in some of the hottest design areas today. A second-level indirect to be sure but that gives me the luxury of taking a broad view. A recent discussion I had with Kurt Shuler (VP Marketing at Arteris IP) is in this class. As a conscientious marketing… Read More
Arm announced their Neoverse plans not long ago at TechCon 2018. Neoverse is a brand, launched by Arm, to provide the foundations for cloud to edge infrastructure in support of their vision of a trillion edge devices. To a cynic this might sound like marketing hype. Sure, they’re widely used in communications infrastructure and… Read More
Frequent Semiwiki readers are well aware of the industry momentum behind machine learning applications. New opportunities are emerging at a rapid pace. High-level programming language semantics and compilers to capture and simulate neural network models have been developed to enhance developer productivity (link). Researchers… Read More
In 1969 the Internet was born at UCLA when a computer there sent a message to a computer at Stanford. By 1975, there were 57 computers on the ‘internet’. Interestingly in the early seventies I actually used the original Xerox Sigma 7 connected to the internet in Boelter Hall at UCLA. A similar vintage computer is now in this room commemorating… Read More
When we think of datacenters, we think of serried ranks of high-performance servers. Recent announcements from Google (on the Tensor Processing Unit), Facebook and others have opened our eyes to the role that specialized hardware and/or GPUs can play in support of deep/machine learning and big data analytics. But most of us would… Read More
I talked recently about the Intel acquisition of Altera which seems to be all about using FPGA technology to build custom accelerators for the datacenter. Some algorithms, especially in search, vision, video and so on map much better onto a hardware fabric than being implemented in code on a regular microprocessor.
So if the heart… Read More
While I was at the imec Technology Forum someone asked me “Why did Intel pay $15B for Altera?” (the actual reported number is $16.7B).
The received wisdom is that Intel decided that it needs FPGA technology to remain competitive in the datacenter. There is a belief among some people that without FPGA acceleration available for vision… Read More
Today Xilinx announced SDAccel, an initiative for the data-center. This is the second of a series of software defined development initiatives for various markets, the first being SDNet that is targeted at building networking applications. One challenge that a company like Xilinx faces is that as the scale of design move up to … Read More
Last week I attended the Linley Datacenter Conference. This is not the conference on mobile which is not until April. However, a lot of the growth in datacenter is driven by mobile, with the increasing dominance of the model where data is accessed by smartphones but a lot of the backend computing and datastorage is in the cloud.
From… Read More
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
