Design for the System Age

Design for the System Age
by Bernard Murphy on 06-17-2016 at 7:00 am

Of late, it has become painfully obvious that the value of electronics is in the system. And since systems demand continuing improvement, increasing performance and decreasing cost (once partially guaranteed by semiconductor process advances) is now sought through algorithm advances – witness the Google TPU and custom… Read More


New NVIDIA Tesla M10 Could Drive Enterprise VDI Reassessment

New NVIDIA Tesla M10 Could Drive Enterprise VDI Reassessment
by Patrick Moorhead on 06-12-2016 at 12:00 pm

NVIDIA is well known for its leadership in graphics processors (GPUs) for gaming, but their business is quickly diversifying with significant growth in other areas like their datacenter and automotive businesses. Within the datacenter, NVIDIA has been evangelizing a vision for a number of years about the benefits of GPUs for… Read More


AMD Brings More Console Features To PC Gaming

AMD Brings More Console Features To PC Gaming
by Patrick Moorhead on 06-12-2016 at 7:00 am

Advanced Micro Devices made a big press splash when they won all three major game console platforms. Their presence inside the Microsoft Xbox One, Sony PS4 and Nintendo Wii U has benefited the company financially at the operating income level and has governed how they design their future GPUs. As Advanced Micro Devices has remained… Read More


NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Poised To Claim The Gaming And VR Performance Crown

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Poised To Claim The Gaming And VR Performance Crown
by Patrick Moorhead on 06-08-2016 at 12:00 pm

NVIDIA has been teasing the promise of Pascal for years, but this year Pascal’s performance became much more real. With the announcement of the Tesla P100 based on Pascal, NVIDIA was able to show the neural-network world what Pascal was really capable of. However, that chip is very different from the gaming-focused Pascal chip … Read More


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