Happy 50th birthday to the Intel 4004
The chip that changed the world
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
Jensen Huang to Receive Semiconductor Industry’s Top Honor
Adding to his list of honors Jensen Huang is recognized by the industry
Resistance is futile
We are the Borg. We will assimilate you
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
Intel enters the age of the ångström
Intel has received a lot of criticism about losing its cadence in semiconductor node steps. Part of the criticism was over naming the features used for defining a node. Should it be the width of the gate, the length, how do you address 3D, stacking, and wrapping? No simple answer. If you think you might live long enough, you could … Read more
Pat Gelsinger opens up Intel’s checkbook for IDM 2.0
$20 billion investment to take back first place
AMD Ryzen PRO 5000 Series Mobile Processors
AMD introduced its Ryzen Pro 5000 Series Mobile Processors based on the Zen 3 core architecture. The new processors are designed for premium business laptops and include AMD’s hardware-based PRO technologies for enterprise-class security features. AMD addresses security on multiple levels for the new Ryzen Pro 5000 series The chips were announced with two significant design wins, one from … Read more
You want processors, asks Intel
Besides changing its CEO and sending automated automobiles cruising in Munich, Intel also had a lot of processor news for CES. Intel’s Executive VP Gregory Bryant kicked off the presentation of the company’s 11th gen CPUs saying, “Only Intel has the breadth of products spanning multiple architectures; the large, open ecosystem; sheer scale of manufacturing footprint; and deep technical expertise … Read more
If you like Zen2, you’ll love Zen3
(Source: AMD) AMD created an extraordinarily good design with the Zen architecture in April 2017. You can measure that by the steady generation-to-generation improvements the company has made with Zen’s various derivatives. The latest iteration is the new Ryzens. AMD predicts a 19% improvement in instructions-per-clock (IPC) for the Zen 3 over last year’s Zen 2 design version. This improvement … Read more