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…
August 21,20-12, Flash Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—David Eggleston from Rambus described the affects that changing technologies have on systems. Moore’s law allows for increasing memory over time and the availability of various storage modes influences next generation systems. Over time, systems adapt to memory. As a revolution, this leads to massive changes which amount…
August 21, 2012, Flash Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Kevin Connelly from Sandisk talked about the changes in systems due to the advent of flash. After 25 years, flash is taking the PC to the next level off computing. Flash technology started in ’80 when Matsuoka at Toshiba invented the basic technology. By ’87, they had…
August 7, 2012, Siggraph, Los Angeles—We talked with Adam Glick from AMD about their accelerated processor products. The new integrated processors can accelerate the workflows for graphics workers by offering high performance at low power. AMD is positioning the latest chip as the first part in this next generation of computing. The entry-level workstation platform,…
June 14, 2012, Invensense Motion Interface Developers’ Conference, San Francisco—David Borison from Invensense talked about getting the most performance out of a sensor array. Even though gaming seems the most obvious application needing high-performance, many other apps are greatly improved when the developer extracts the most performance from the sensors. Gesture user interfaces are smoother,…
May 24, 2012, MEMS Business Forum, Santa Clara, CA—Jeffery Hilbert from WiSpry discussed the drivers for better performance in mobile devices. Adding RF MEMS and changing driving software can be a cost-effective solution to the problems of current architectures. Mobile phones represent a multi-billion unit market for the RF front-end components. Smart phones are forecast…
We talked with Samsung about their various memory product lines. The constant drivers for changes are the demands for higher performance, higher capacity, and in of growing importance, lower power. The specific product lines we discussed were DDR three, SSD, and mobile memories. At the high performance and of the spectrum, DDR-3 memories are used…
April 11, 2012, Flextech Alliance Workshop, San Jose, CA—Joshua Hagen from the US Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson AFB described the programs and changing needs in their work. They need to instrument people as well as they do airplanes to match and track performance capabilities. Their facility tests prototypes and has an analysis testbed…
April 12, 2012 Mentor Graphics User2User Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Sameer Halepete from Nvidia projected that super phones will become the driver for compute power rivaling that of a supercomputer. The integration of al of the functions into a single chip will be the impetus for the trillion transistor SoC. GPUs are getting bigger and the…
March 21, 2012, SensorCon 2012, Santa Clara, CA—A panel of experts discussed the growing influence of sensors on the electronics market. Pallab Chatterjee moderated the panel. Panel members included Terry O’Shea from Intel, Kevin Shaw from Sensor Platforms, Janusz Bryzek from Fairchild Semiconductor, and MP Divakar from Microlytics. Are there infrastructure limits to increases in…