CPU

Imagination catapults RISC-V cores into the market

(Source: Wikipedia)   Imagination Technologies (IMG) announced it has a RISC-V processor design available. The IMG RTXM-2200 is the company’s first real-time embedded RISC-V CPU. It is, according to IMG, a scalable, 32-bit flexible design for a wide range of high-volume devices. The RTXM-2200 is one of the first commercial cores in Imagination’s Catapult CPU family. The company announced it … Read more

AMD’s Q4 2021 results

AMD reported record quarterly revenue of $4.8 billion up 49% year-over-year and record full-year revenue of $16.4 billion up 68%. Gross margin expanded and operating income more than doubled from the prior year. “2021 was an outstanding year for AMD with record annual revenue and profitability,” said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “Each of our businesses performed extremely … Read more

AMD’s new Ryzen 6000 processor

AMD announced the Fusion project in 2006 after the acquisition of ATI: the integrating of a GPU with the CPU. However, Intel beat AMD to it and in January 2011 introduced the Clarkdale with an integrated GPU. AMD came out in June 2011 with the Llano and called it an APU—Accelerated Processing Unit. AMD always had more shader cores than … Read more

Imagination back in the CPU business

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

Qualcomm takes on the ARM CPU challenge

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

Intel Q3 2021 results

Intel reported its third-quarter revenue had a strong recovery in the Enterprise portion of Data Center Group (DCG) and the Internet of Things Group (IOTG), which saw higher demand amid recovery from the economic impacts of COVID-19. The Client Computing Group (CCG) was down due to lower notebook volumes due to industry-wide component shortages and lower adjacent revenue, partially offset … Read more

AMD’s big cache exposed at Hot Chips

AMD changed the rules when it introduced its chiplet packaging approach and demonstrated it could beat Amdahl’s Law and scale-up processors. At Hot Chips 2021, they revealed a bit more about their packaging magic, and their 3D V-Cache uses a novel new hybrid bonding technique. This manufacturing scheme can create up to an impressive 192 MB of L3 cache per … Read more

The Arc of the Alchemist

No, not a new Steve Winward song, a new GPU family   As you know, or should know, Intel has been up to their old trick of changing names and requiring you to get an upgrade to your Captain Midnight decoder ring. They did a few weeks back when Pat Gelsinger came in and introduced the world to Angstroms. And … Read more

Moore’s Law decline: the short and the long, the incremental and the revolutionary

In the literal sense, Moore’s Law—long a definition and quantification of the down-scaling of the silicon-integrated transistor area and cost—has slowed or ended, depending on how strictly one interprets the definition. But, Moore’s Law is not the point, it's a metric. Technology R&D will continue to find new ways to advance the performance and price-performance of processors and that is the point.  The semantic details … Read more