November 10, 2015, ARM TechCon, Santa Clara, CA—Mike Muller CTO from ARM talked about the changes in semiconductors over the past 25 years. Not only has transistor density increased according to Moore’s law, but so have functionality and capabilities. The change have also gone into other categories, like data discs. A CD has row and…
August 20, 2015, Intel Developer Forum, San Francisco—Rik Dunphy from Intel presented some tips for optimizing video processing and delivery on Xeon processors. The latest E3 processor family has added new processing capabilities which will require different approaches to server-class video processing. The nature of video workloads is changing with more offline file-based transcoding, and…
March 4, 2015, Game Developer Conference, San Francisco—Pete Baker and Chris Silva from Intel presented their views on the future of PC gaming. In some sense, the whole computer industry needs PC games to drive improvements in graphics performance at high volumes. Gaming evolves at a fantastic pace. The industry is always seeing better performance…
February 2015 – The cost of developing new process nodes and validating the libraries is getting prohibitive. As a result, the processor groups are slowing down Moore’s law by holding on the same node as last year and now moving to design and layout optimization to improve power and performance characteristics. This theme was repeated…
October 2, 2014, ArmTechCon, Santa Clara, CA—Kevin Shaw from Audience talked about the changes in architectures to enable easier integration of sensors into systems. An open sensor hub platform allows greater levels of abstraction of the sensors and better partitioning of the whole system. Systems architectures are evolving to add more sensors. The problem is…
April 1, 2014, EE Live Conference, San Jose, CA—Kamal Khouri from AMD and Warren Kurisu from Mentor Graphics described their new partnership to supply Linux development tools for embedded systems for the various AMD processors. The intent of the partnership is to provide robust development tools, libraries, and workflows for more embedded processors. AMD decided…
March 2014 – Broadcom held a briefing on their new microprocessor offerings for the IT and networking marketplace at their headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. As companies shift from in-house networking to using the cloud for both computation and storage, the bottlenecks and challenges that have historically taken place inside the company are now shifting…
February 2014, At ISSCC in San Francisco, the traditional launch of new microprocessors was done in session 5. The session features new architectures and designs in the Power PC, ARM, Xeon and x86 solution space from IBM, Intel and AMD. Large data centers and cloud service providers are increasingly becoming the point of computation in…
February 10, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Mark Horowitz from Stanford talked about the need to change our views of computing and energy use. Even though Moore and Dennard promised lower costs and higher performance with every generation, we are hitting some fundamental limits. Computers, or microprocessors are showing up everywhere, even in disposable greeting cards. But…
October 2013 – The opening session of the Linley Tech Processor event is usually on multi-core architectures. This year, it was the same, with the exception that the bandwagon for multi-core was all ARM 64 bit. Broadcom, Freescale, Cavium, and Synopsys all launched products, tools and IP for supporting the ARM64 ecosystem. This system is…