As George E.P. Box said, “essentially all models are wrong but some are useful.” That is certainly the case with Carbon’s models. For processors they have two models, one that is fast (but not timing-accurate) and one that is accurate (but not fast). But both are useful.
Carbon attended the ARM TechCon in Santa… Read More
By now, you’ve probably read about the Imagination Technologies acquisition of MIPS somewhere, hopefully in the Eric Esteve article here. There’s an interesting side effect not being talked about much.… Read More
It was not really a surprise to learn that, finally, MIPS have been sold, as the company was officially for sale since April 2012. Nevertheless, the interesting part of this news comes from the buyer’ identity: Imagination Technologies. Imagination is an UK based company, like ARM, selling processor IP cores, like ARM, but the … Read More
At the annual Linley Processor Conference this past week a number of chip vendors proposed a raft of new networking solutions directed at solving today’s bandwidth issues. Perhaps the overall highlight of the conference was the recognition by Keynote Speaker Linley Gwennap of the shift that is taking place towards ARM based solutions.… Read More
I was at the Linley Processor Conference yesterday. There are two of these each year, one focused on mobile and this one, focused on networking and communications (so routers, base-stations and the like). You probably know that ARM is pretty dominant in mobile handsets (and Intel is trying to get a toe-hold although I’m skeptical… Read More
One of the comments to previous installments of this series was that there isn’t much left for the merchant suppliers of smart mobile SoCs, considering Apple and Samsung have majority share and design their own parts. The theory is this makes it hard for many suppliers to continue investing at the resource levels needed to bring … Read More
The Linley Group, whose conference on mobile I recently attended, has some interesting data about the processor core market. Firstly, the numbers are big: CPU cores shipped in over 10 billion chips last year which is up 25% on last. ARM has a share of 78% of that entire market. The big surprise to me was the #2 was not MIPS but Synopsys… Read More
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 surmised a month ago that Broadcom could be a likely acquirer of TI’s OMAP business in order to compete more effectively in Smart Phones and Tablets. I was not bold enough. Instead, Broadcom has offered $3.7B for Netlogic in order to be an even bigger player in the communications infrastructure market by picking up TCAMs and a family… Read More
