Linley Newsletter
Analysis of new developments in microprocessors and other semiconductor products
Current MPR Articles
October 25, 2021
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Apple A15 Extends Battery Life
The new A15 processor doubles its system cache to an industry-leading 32MB and drives double-digit performance gains across the CPU, GPU, and AI engine, while boosting battery life.
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Editorial: Intel AI Strategy Ready to Reboot
To avoid customer confusion and strengthen its market position, Intel must rationalize an array of overlapping AI chips that have taxed the resources of even the world’s largest processor vendor.
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Coherent Logix Debuts Edge-AI SoC
After serving niche applications with its reconfigurable designs, Coherent Logix introduced an SoC that will serve as a development vehicle for edge AI, software-defined radio, and other real-time applications.
October 18, 2021
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Google Builds Video-Transcoder Chip
To better support its massive YouTube business, Google has created its own video-transcoding chip. The VCU design offers a 40x performance gain compared with CPUs.
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Loihi 2 Advances Spiking R&D
Intel Labs has developed a second-generation neuromorphic processor using the Intel 4 process. It’s also offering the open-source Lava framework to advance neuromorphic software.
October 11, 2021
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Anton 3 Cracks Molecular Dynamics
Billionaire David E. Shaw has spent two decades quietly building highly specialized supercomputers. Anton 3 is his newest ASIC for accelerating molecular-dynamics simulations.
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Samsung Demos In-Memory Processing
The company disclosed architecture and performance details for the processor-in-memory (PIM) version of its popular Aquabolt HBM2. The HBM-PIM, dubbed Aquabolt-XL, adds compute to a drop-in HBM2 stack.
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Cadence Takes Tensilica AI to the Max
The new Tensilica AI lineup comprises three product tiers that Cadence calls AI Base, AI Boost, and AI Max, along with a new accelerator and a multicore model that can deliver up to 32 TOPS.
October 4, 2021
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Enflame Lifts Veil on Training Chip
The well-funded Chinese AI startup revealed architectural details of its first chip shortly after announcing its T20 second-generation design with 4x better inference performance plus TF32 for training.
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Dimensity 810 Trims Phone Power
The new Dimensity 810 boosts the single-thread CPU throughput by 17% compared with the Dimensity 800 while reducing power consumption, while the Dimensity 920 upgrades gaming performance.
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Kompanio Powers 5G Tablets
MediaTek has added a new brand to its portfolio by introducing two tablet processors, refreshing its Arm compute strategy by reusing its latest Dimensity smartphone chips.
September 27, 2021
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Qualcomm Spills Cloud AI 100 Guts
Shortly after demonstrating outstanding performance per watt in recent MLPerf Inference results, Qualcomm revealed internal-architecture details of its Cloud AI 100 accelerator at last month’s Hot Chips.
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SOT MRAM Improves Access Speed
Startup Antaios is leading the commercialization of spin-orbit-torque (SOT) magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM), which promises greater longevity and faster access times than previous MRAMs.
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Editorial: Intel, AMD Differ on Chiplets
Intel has developed several high-performance chiplet technologies, but their cost restricts them to low volume. AMD’s lower-cost approach raises volume today but won’t meet future requirements.
September 20, 2021
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Tesla D1 Tackles AI Training
In a surprising move, Tesla has developed its own AI training accelerator. The D1 design crams 25 chips into an enormous wafer-scale package that generates an industry-leading 9 petaflop/s.
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Cerebras Performs Extreme Training
The company hopes to meet the demands of huge neural networks by offering its new MemoryX and SwarmX systems, which aim to reduce GPT-3 training time to less than one day.
September 13, 2021
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Sapphire Rapids Spans Tiles
The next-generation Xeon processor is Intel’s biggest leap forward in years, delivering greater core counts, more per-core performance, integrated accelerators, and the latest memory and I/O interfaces.
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Alder Lake Extends Battery Life
Alder Lake is Intel’s first mainstream PC processor with a hybrid architecture, combining big and small cores to increase both performance and battery life.
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Mount Evans Puts Intel in DPU Range
The company recently disclosed architectural details of its first data-processing unit, combining a control plane and a programmable data plane to handle Ethernet speeds up to 200Gbps.
September 6, 2021
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Intel Stacks Tiles on Ponte Vecchio
The new high-performance GPU is an engineering marvel, using Intel’s EMIB and Foveros technologies to create a heterogeneous processor combining 47 discrete die (tiles) built in five different process nodes.
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Golden Cove Adds Matrix Units
Intel’s new flagship CPU microarchitecture delivers a big performance boost for general-purpose code while AI operations increase 8x using the new Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX).
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Gracemont Bulks Up in Performance
Intel’s family of “little” CPUs hits a bold new performance level by doubling the execution width and making other changes, offering a 20% jump in per-clock performance over its predecessor.
August 30, 2021
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Telum Adds AI Accelerator to IBM Z
IBM’s new Z-series mainframe processor sets an industry record with more than 512MB of on-die memory and is the first high-end processor to ship with an integrated deep-learning accelerator (DLA).
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AI-Camera Chips Sharpen Surveillance
Ambarella is sampling the CV5S and CV52S, which support 8K and 6K resolution, respectively. Realtek’s RT3916N handles 5 megapixels at 30fps, targeting lower-cost smart-camera systems.
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ArchiTek Offers Virtual Engines
A Japanese startup has developed a configurable architecture that uses multiple fixed-function engines to increase power efficiency for a broad range of workloads in AI-based edge systems.
August 23, 2021
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Chipmakers Boost AI Efficiency by 5x
As wafer costs rise sharply, chip designers are working to boost area efficiency and performance. Our analysis of the newest flagship smartphone processors reveals that efficiency increased by up to 5x from generation to generation.
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Renesas R-Car Drives Digital Cockpits
The R-Car Gen3e line offers new cost-saving configurations along with performance and functional-safety improvements for digital-instrument clusters and infotainment systems in entry-level and midrange vehicles.
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Marvell Adds Innovium Cloud Switches
Hot on the heels of closing its Inphi acquisition, Marvell announced an agreement to buy switch-chip startup Innovium. The deal will give it a leading position in data-center switching.
August 16, 2021
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Mali-G78 Catches Up to Apple GPU
Apple’s new A14 GPU is blurring the line between PC and mobile performance, but the design offers less of a performance increase than previous generations, allowing competitors to regain ground.
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PsiQuantum Develops Optical Qubits
A new startup is using a different approach in hopes of building the first quantum computer that can run for millions of cycles, enough to solve real-world problems, but it faces many challenges.
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Unisantis Memory Mixes DRAM, Flash
The company has revealed details of its unique DRAM/flash hybrid memory technology, along with ambitious plans to overturn the global memory market.
August 9, 2021
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Intel Extends Process Roadmap to 20A
The company unveiled an ambitious plan to regain the fab-technology lead by 2025 with a rapid-fire series of renumbered process nodes that include its first with gate-all-around (GAA) transistors.
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Edged.AI Offers Low-Latency IP
A new startup offers deep-learning-accelerator intellectual property (IP) for high-performance edge SoCs aimed at autonomous systems that require low-latency inference.
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Editorial: Same Transistors, New Names
IC-process names have become disconnected from transistor size and other physical parameters, leading Intel to abandon nanometers. These marketing names disguise the lack of progress in shrinking transistors.