August 18, 2011, Hot Chips 23 Conference, Stanford, CA—George Cox from Intel described the design for a digital random number generator (RNG). This building block is used for creating keys for cryptography and the higher the randomness, the better. To date, the highest randomness is entropy and the increasing need for security calls for something…
August 8, 2011, Hot Chips 23, Stanford, CA—Simon Seegars from ARM described the evolution of ARM processors and how they are now bringing high performance to mobile devices. Technology changes over time and the sometimes the changes bring pleasant surprises to consumers. Processors and technology have evolved tremendously over the last 30 years. We have…
August 8, 2011, Hot Chips 23, Stanford, CA—Ruud Haring from IBM described the latest Blue Gene massively parallel supercomputer. He noted that one of the system design objectives included capabilities to move supercomputing from the scientific community to commercial applications. Design objectives included reducing the total cost of operations and achieve greater power efficiency. In…
August 8, 2011, Hot Chips 23, Stanford, CA—Richard Kessler described a MIPS-based multi-core processor that raises the bar for performance/$/Watt. This chip is focused on networking and wireless server functions and has an integrated security engine for cryptographic operation acceleration. It is designed to take advantage of packet and flow parallelism and exhibits linear performance…