Is Tesla Making Their Own CPUs?

Is Tesla Making Their Own CPUs?
by Daniel Nenni on 05-03-2016 at 4:00 pm

One of the benefits of administering a leading semiconductor design enablement portal is that I get to see the traffic patterns then try and figure out what’s behind them. For example, a Cupertino domain has been reading all of our automotive content very thoroughly. We also get hits by Google.com, Amazon.com, and dozens of other… Read More


Verdi Update and NVIDIA on Verification Compiler

Verdi Update and NVIDIA on Verification Compiler
by Bernard Murphy on 03-11-2016 at 12:00 pm

Synopsys hosted a lunch session on Thursday of DVCon. Michael Sanie of Synopsys opened the session, with a look back at the last DVCon where he had talked about Verification Compiler (VC) and extending the platform to Verification Continuum, which adds emulation and FPGA-based prototyping (HAPS – there was a very cool HAPS demo… Read More


Five Reasons to be More Bullish on a 2016 Commercial PC Refresh

Five Reasons to be More Bullish on a 2016 Commercial PC Refresh
by Patrick Moorhead on 03-01-2016 at 10:00 pm

Last week’s IDC and Gartner Q4-2015 report on PC sales sent a shock-wave through the industry. The stock market responded with a sell-off of major PC-related names like Advanced Micro Devices, HP Inc. (fka Hewlett-Packard), Intel, Lenovo, and NVIDIA. While I was disappointed in the Q4 numbers, I also have a good grasp of what was… Read More


Neural Networks Ready for Embedded Platforms

Neural Networks Ready for Embedded Platforms
by Tom Simon on 02-24-2016 at 7:00 am

If you are not yet familiar with the term Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNN for short, you are certainly bound to become in the year ahead. Using Artificial Intelligence in the form of CNN is on the verge of replacing a large number of computing tasks, especially those involving recognizing things such as sounds, shapes, objects,… Read More


Advanced Micro Device’s New Polaris FinFET-Based Architecture Could Open New Doors

Advanced Micro Device’s New Polaris FinFET-Based Architecture Could Open New Doors
by Patrick Moorhead on 02-21-2016 at 4:00 pm

It seems of late like there is an unlimited thirst for GPU performance at the right power efficiency. Whether it is deep learning, object recognition, artificial intelligence, simulations, VR or AR, the industry desperately needs GPU improvements. Many within the graphics industry would agree that a new era of graphics performance… Read More


AMD’s GPUOpen Initiative Architected To Move The Industry In A Different Direction

AMD’s GPUOpen Initiative Architected To Move The Industry In A Different Direction
by Patrick Moorhead on 01-15-2016 at 12:00 pm

GPUOpen is a new initiative started by Advanced Micro Devices’ Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) as a way for the company to continue to reach out to the needs to developers by giving them a better development environment. The idea behind GPUOpen is born out of the work that Advanced Micro Device’s did with Mantle, their own low-level… Read More


Advanced Micro Devices’s Head Of Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, Talks About Their Future

Advanced Micro Devices’s Head Of Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, Talks About Their Future
by Patrick Moorhead on 01-13-2016 at 4:00 pm

Since Advanced Micro Devices announced their new Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), many have wondered what direction the graphics division would go with its new-found autonomy. The new RTG group within Advanced Micro Devices is still a wholly-owned division of the company but still potentially ripe for acquisition or spinoff.… Read More


FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016

FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016
by Tom Simon on 01-13-2016 at 12:00 pm

It used to be that GPU chips moved to new process nodes pretty frequently, previously as often as annually. That is up until 2011. That was the year that 28nm GPU’s were unveiled. Since then there has been a long pause. Now in the wake of the 2016 CES both Nvidia, with its previously announced Pascal, and AMD, with the just announced Polaris,… Read More


High Level Synthesis. Are We There Yet?

High Level Synthesis. Are We There Yet?
by Paul McLellan on 06-16-2015 at 7:00 am

High level synthesis (HLS) seems to have been part of the backdrop of design automation for so long that it seems to be one of those things that nobody notices any more. But it has also crept up on people and gone from interesting technology to keep an eye on to getting genuine adoption. The first commercial product in the space was behavioral… Read More


NVIDIA and Qualcomm Talk about High Level Synthesis, Samsung on Low Power for Mobile

NVIDIA and Qualcomm Talk about High Level Synthesis, Samsung on Low Power for Mobile
by Daniel Payne on 05-31-2015 at 4:00 pm

Since 1978 I’ve seen many trends in the semiconductor design world: transistor-level IC design, gate-level design, RTL coding, High Level Synthesis (HLS) and IP re-use. We’ve witnessed the growth in design productivity enabling chips starting with just thousands of transistor all the way up to billions of transistors… Read More