August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA-Praveen Dongara from AMD described the changes and advances in the latest APU called Richland. This processor SoC addresses the needs for variable thermal profiles and performance in a client device. The performance in the CPU and GPU are improved through higher frequencies due to process improvements and…
August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA-Michael Brody from Winston and Strawn discussed the use and abuse of patents in the semiconductor industry. Silicon Valley and patents have been closely linked from the first semiconductor company. After a review of patent law and the rationale for getting patents, Brody noted that the semiconductor industry…
August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA-David Kidd from Suvota presented an ARM Cortex implementation that reduced power by half, using deeply depleted channel transistors. Although the ARM core is not a power hog, the implications for the other functions in an SoC are significant. In a deeply depleted channel transistor, the basic FET…
August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA-Peter De Dobbelaere from Luxtera talked about integrating photonics technology as a platform for optical I/O on silicon. The increase in data rates requires a conversion to optical media to meet the data speed and volume requirements. Silicon photonics is the use of modified silicon to perform optical…
August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA—Robert Colwell, director of the Microsystems technology office at DARPA and former Intel manager, sees the end of Dennard scaling within the next decade, resulting in Moore’s Law becoming a purely economic function. The coming end of Moore’s Law is something that the industry looks at like watching…
August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA—Prakash Iyer from Intel presented the internal details of the latest Atom processor. Clovertrail+ is a dual core processor manufactured in a 32nm high-k, metal gate process and is directed towards phones and tablets. The 32-bit machine has integrated memory controller, graphics subsystems, GPU, various encoders and decoders,…
August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA—John Sell described the basic internals of the Xbox main SoC. Although there are marketing issues associated with the console, the main chip includes an impressive collection of functional blocks. The main chip mates with the wireless control and the Kinect hardware plus the southbridge, which addresses 8GB…
August 26, 2013, Hot Chips Conference, Stanford, CA—Dan Bouvier from AMD described the changes and improvements in the latest AMD APU, called Kabini. This chip is a full SoC with multiple cores and integrated functions. The latest chip is built in a 28nm process, fits into a 105 m2 die and contains 914M transistors. The…
August 28, 2012, Hot Chips Symposium, Cupertino, CA—This year’s Hot Chips key topic was power management. Intel, AMD, and MIPS all talked about re-architecting the cache controller to reduce misses and, as a result, greatly reduce power. Other major changes included new logic cells and significant architectural changes in other functional units. Power and performance…
August 28, 2012, Hot Chips Conference, Cupertino, CA—The improvements in the core compute functions moves the data bottleneck to other areas of the systems. Three papers describe the on-going efforts to improve the data transport functions within a system. Ronald Dreslinski from the University of Michigan talked about a self-arbitrating crossbar for networks on chip…