Processors Rule the Day

Processors Rule the Day
by Tom Simon on 10-09-2015 at 7:00 pm

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


We’re Number Two, We Try Harder

We’re Number Two, We Try Harder
by Paul McLellan on 09-19-2015 at 7:00 am

One of the big surprises I got at Synopsys’ ARC conference is that ARC is #2 in terms of share of licensed microprocessor shipments. I think most readers of Semiwiki would know ARM is #1 but would guess that MIPS (now owned by Imagination Technologies) is #2. But you’d be wrong, ARC is over twice as big.

Last week Synopsys… Read More


Linley Mobile Microprocessor Conference

Linley Mobile Microprocessor Conference
by Paul McLellan on 03-31-2015 at 7:00 am

As The Who sang on Who’s Next:Keep me movin’, groovin’, groovin’, yeah
Movin’, Yeah
Mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile, …

On April 22nd and 23rd the place to be moving (or movin’) to will be the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. Because What’s Next is this year’s Linley Mobile ConferenceRead More


Qualcomm Enters Server CPU Market

Qualcomm Enters Server CPU Market
by Paul McLellan on 11-19-2014 at 6:00 pm

Fresh from the leaked memo that Intel is merging its mobile business into its PC client group, Qualcomm is going the other way and has confirmed that it is entering the ARM server CPU market, an announcement made at its analyst day earlier today.

This is a major trend that less than a month ago I reported from the Linley microprocessor… Read More


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