Microprocessors: Will ARM Rule the World?

Microprocessors: Will ARM Rule the World?
by Paul McLellan on 10-30-2014 at 12:00 pm

Last week was the Linley Microprocessor Conference. Not the mobile one, which I find the most interesting since smartphones are such a bit part of what drives process technology these days, this is the one focused on networking and servers. But increasingly both markets are being driven by the same thing, namely mobile data. In … Read More


Demler: Quad Core is Just For Marketing; Intel Will Not Succeed in Mobile

Demler: Quad Core is Just For Marketing; Intel Will Not Succeed in Mobile
by Paul McLellan on 10-15-2014 at 9:00 pm

At Memcon today Mike Demler of the Linley Group (and coincidentally someone who used to work for me back at Cadence and who now run Memcon, small world) gave an interesting presentation on Trends in Mobile Processors. A mobile application processor (AP) is a highly integrated SoC to run the applications in a mobile device. Mostly… Read More


Dark Silicon

Dark Silicon
by Paul McLellan on 05-26-2014 at 5:29 pm

One of the problems with chips today is that of so-called “dark silicon”. We can put massive functionality on an SoC today. A billion transistors, and that is just at 28nm. But power constraints (both leakage and dynamic power) limit how much of the chip can be powered up at any one time. In some cases this is not that big… Read More


Data Outgrowing Datacenter Performance

Data Outgrowing Datacenter Performance
by Paul McLellan on 02-10-2014 at 1:13 pm

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


Server Shift to ARM Becomes a Stampede

Server Shift to ARM Becomes a Stampede
by Paul McLellan on 10-19-2013 at 3:00 pm

I have been at the Linley Microprocessor Conference today. This is the one that is not about mobile: about servers, networking, base-stations. Probably the most important story about the whole industry is that the “shift to ARM becomes a stampede.”


In this market it seems to be driven by the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction… Read More


Andes: the Biggest Microprocessor IP Company You’ve Never Hear Of

Andes: the Biggest Microprocessor IP Company You’ve Never Hear Of
by Paul McLellan on 10-16-2013 at 3:06 pm

I wrote in April about Andes Technology, a microprocessor IP licensing company that even the person sitting next to me, a strategic marketing guy from Qualcomm had never heard of. So, OK, if you read that earlier article you had at least heard of them.

Part of the reason you haven’t heard of them is that they are in Taiwan (in Hsinchu)… Read More


Andes, ARM, Imagination, MIPS

Andes, ARM, Imagination, MIPS
by Paul McLellan on 04-19-2013 at 12:44 pm

The last session of the day for Linley Mobile was about processors to go into smartphones. One surprise was that there is a core that nobody seems to have heard of since it is only really used in Taiwan up until now, and it is used in several Mediatek chips.

The most “glamorous” processor in a smartphone is the one in the application… Read More


Linley Mobile

Linley Mobile
by Paul McLellan on 04-19-2013 at 12:11 pm

I was at the Linley Mobile Microprocessor conference earlier in the week. Well, just the first day since the second day overlapped with the GSA Silicon Summit. The first surprise was seeing Mike Demler in a suit. It turns out that he has joined the Linley Group as a full-time analyst in the mobile space.


Linley Gwennap started the day… Read More


April 17-19: Overbooked!

April 17-19: Overbooked!
by Paul McLellan on 04-01-2013 at 4:23 pm

For three days in a couple of weeks time there is a crash of conferences, spread out all over the extended Bay Area.

Firstly, from 17-19th April at the Santa Clara Hyatt is the Linley Mobile Conference. This covers all things microprocessor in the mobile industry. Details of the conference including the full agenda are here. The conference… 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