CES 2022 started the year out with a bang, staging an in-person event in that charming little burg in Nevada, However, several dozens of the biggest and smartest companies chose not to go share the air with the unknown, unwashed, and unvaccinated throngs populating the casinos. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia all held virtual announcements, saving gazillions of dollars and untold … Read more
It looks like Intel won’t be moving the Xe product to Intel 3 but rather use TSMC’s 3 nm process.
Imagination is no newcomer to CPUs and designed a few for its audio and TV products and some other special-purpose products. Its big move, however, was In 2012 when Imagination announced it would acquire MIPS for $60 million. In 2017 Imagination sold MIPS for $65 million, so Imagination could be acquired by Canyon bridge. Imagination had been a partner with … Read more
The GPU market has expanded with the announcement that Innosilicon, a cryptocurrency ASIC builder, have applied their talents to building a GPU using Imagination Technologies’ BXT 32-1024 MC4 RTL IP. The company was founded in 2006 in Zhuhai, China, a modern city in China’s southern Guangdong province, on the border with Macau, with R&D in Shanghai and Wuhan. The company … Read more
“It ain’t over till it’s over”—Yogi Berra, 1973
If you are the one person who hasn’t heard the U.S. FTC may block San Jose-based Nvidia’s intention to acquire UK-based Arm from Japan-based Softbank, then let me be the one to bring you up to date. On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission moved to block Nvidia’s planned $40 billion purchase of SoftBank’s semiconductor business Arm Ltd., saying the deal … Read more
Nvidia's Q3’21 earnings report continues the company’s revenue gains and sets another record. For the third quarter ended October 31, 2021, the company reported sales of $7.1 billion, up 50% from a year earlier and up 9.2% from the previous quarter, with record revenue from the company’s Gaming, Data Center, and Professional Visualization platforms. The company’s Graphics business revenue was … Read more
When Qualcomm introduced its PC clone that could run Windows and apps, people got curious. Was it just a Chromebook competitor or was there something new going on? Intel tried it with PDAs back in 1999 with StrongARM, but Microsoft didn’t get it then and made a half-hearted offering of a stripped-down OS, not the real Windows, and people weren’t … Read more
The chip that changed the world
Unless you lived in Texas in the 70s
This could be an entertaining or totally aggravating, lawyer invoking party game—ask when the personal computer was invented. Someone did—ask that is. There’s a charming site located in Seattle called Blinkenlights Archeological Institute. It was established in 1997 to excavate, preserve, research, and present interesting and historically significant computing devices. The website, http://www. blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml, lists seven qualifications of what constitutes … Read more
It was integrated circuits that made Moore’s observation possible. You can’t scale something unless you have the thing, and six-foot-six Jack Kilby gave us that thing—the integrated circuit. Fifty-six years ago, in a little lab on Forest Lane, Dallas Texas Kilby asked the basic question: “Why do we need the wires? If I make parts out of all of the … Read more
