» Archived Articles | Login | Activate My Subscription | Subscribe | Free Sample Articles | Purchase an Article

Current MPR Articles

January 17, 2022

• Intel Completes Alder Lake Lineup
  Intel disclosed dozens of new Alder Lake products for both laptop and desktop PCs. The 12th Generation products offer sizable performance gains over earlier models, but often at higher prices.
  

• Year in Review: Image Processors Enhance Phone Chips
  In 2021, image processors (ISPs) became a hot topic in smartphone processors. 5G became an essential feature for midrange and premium phones, but CPU improvements are taken for granted.
  

• Graviton3 Debuts Neoverse V1
  Amazon recently revealed its third-generation server processor, with instances now in preview availability. Graviton3 uses Arm’s Neoverse V1 CPU while maintaining the 64-core count of its predecessor.
  

January 10, 2022

• Year in Review: PC Processors Adopt Hybrid CPUs
  Desktop PCs had a big 2021, thanks to two new Intel releases and that company’s introduction of hybrid technology. Meanwhile, Apple converted most of its Mac lineup to hybrid Arm-compatible processors.
  

• EdgeQ Enables 5G Small Cells
  The startup is sampling an integrated base-station processor with a DSP that uses the RISC-V instruction set. The SoC is suited to 5G small cells and remote units.
  

• Editorial: Imagination Jumps on RISC-V
  With its new Catapult CPUs, Imagination Technologies has become the largest IP vendor to announce RISC-V products, helping position the open-source instruction set as the leading alternative to Arm.
  

January 3, 2022

• Year in Review: CPU-IP Vendors Chase High-End Wins
  In the past year, new CPU cores from Arm and SiFive targeted high-performance applications in the data center and communications infrastructure. Many IP startups instead focused on edge AI.
  

• WD Licenses RISC-V CPUs
  Storage giant Western Digital added Linux and Android support to its Swerv line of RISC-V CPU in its new EHX3. The company is licensing the new CPU, which targets low-end application processing.
  

• Marvell Bridges MIPI to Auto Ethernet
  Marvell announced several products under its new Brightlane automotive brand. The 88QB5224 is a unique chip for bridging MIPI CSI-2 cameras to an Ethernet-based automotive network.
  

December 27, 2021

• Year in Review: Edge AI Knows No Boundaries
  In 2021, edge AI continued propagating far beyond the cloud; smart speakers alone were up 12% from last year. Increased demand attracted investors to edge-AI-chip startups, creating several new unicorns.
  

• P650 Pumps Up Performance by 50%
  SiFive added a new flagship CPU to its RISC-V “Performance” line that raises integer performance compared with its predecessor through additional execution resources, larger caches, and microarchitecture tweaks.
  

• Kompanio 828 Tackles Chromebooks
  For the holidays, MediaTek offers the Kompanio 820 and 828 to refresh its Chromebook line. These chips deliver multiday battery life, in part thanks to their 7nm manufacturing.
  

December 20, 2021

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Sports 18-Bit ISP
  In delivering the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Qualcomm is upscaling smartphone cameras by adding native 18-bit processing. The new platform packs impressive upgrades across all sections, scoring double digit gains across each section.
  

• Qualcomm Eyes Ultrathin PCs
  Providing a big performance boost, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is suitable for some ultrathin Windows PCs, moving up from the 2-in-1 systems where Snapdragon serves today. The company also updated the Snapdragon 7c+.
  

• Year in Review: Data Centers Spur New Architectures
  The past year began with AMD and Intel introducing next-generation server processors. AI-accelerator vendors focused on delivering production-worthy versions of previously announced products, validated by MLPerf testing.
  

December 13, 2021

• MediaTek Reenters Flagship Phones
  After several attempts, MediaTek has delivered its first true flagship processor: the Dimensity 9000. The new smartphone chip features the latest CPU designs, a powerful GPU, and LPDDR5X support.
  

• Ventana Develops RISC-V Chiplet
  The startup has developed a custom high-performance RISC-V CPU that comes as a 16-core chiplet, making it easier for customers to design their own data-center processors.
  

• Editorial: Carmakers Crash Chip Party
  Despite rising chip shipments, record-high demand leaves chip buyers facing shortages. Some carmakers and other customers are working more closely with vendors to better manage limited supplies.
  

December 6, 2021

• NXP i.MX93 Adds AI to IoT Devices
  The first i.MX9 processor will pack 64-bit CPUs, an MCU, and an AI accelerator to handle a range of IoT applications, including industrial control, smart home, smart city, and smart grid.
  

• MediaTek Aims to Change Smart TVs
  With its Pentonic 2000 processor, the TV-chip leader delivers impressive CPU, GPU, and AI-engine improvements to enable new capabilities such as bidirectional video and gaming without a console.
  

• Centaur Trots Off Into the Sunset
  After a 26-year run, Centaur Technology has reached the end of the trail. Glenn Henry’s processor-design team, known for its x86 expertise, has become part of Intel.
  

November 29, 2021

• AMD CDNA2 Targets Supercomputers
  AMD’s Instinct MI250 and MI250X GPUs deliver extreme floating-point performance through massive parallelism, targeting high-end scientific and government research with leading FP64 throughput.
  

• Imagination CXT Fires Photons
  At 1.3 billion rays per second, the Photon architecture in Imagination’s new PowerVR CXT RT3 GPU enables hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing for the first time in mobile devices.
  

• Kneron KL530 Targets Automotive
  Kneron is targeting emerging computer-vision models with its KL530. The new SoC delivers 0.5 trillion INT8 operations per second (TOPS) and supports INT4 format for greater throughput.
  

November 22, 2021

• Cracking Open Snapdragon’s 4-Pack
  In its latest mainstream push, Qualcomm delivers a fresh four-pack filled with CPU, GPU, and camera upgrades. It’s raising performance across multiple segments from low-end to mid-premium.
  

• Editorial: The Next Microprocessor Decade
  Some trends that are big today began more than a decade ago as inconspicuous events. How will recent events look in 10 years? I foresee new architectures and new accelerators but the same transistors.
  

• Epyc Roadmap Gets Specialized
  AMD recently disclosed new details of its Epyc server-processor roadmap, including Milan-X with V-Cache, Genoa based on Zen 4 cores, and Bergamo scaling to 128 cores.
  

November 15, 2021

• History of the Microprocessor, Part 3
  As we celebrate the anniversary of the Intel 4004, this article extends our microprocessor history by covering the top trends from the past decade, including the rise of AI, Nvidia, processor startups, and RISC-V.
  

• 50 Billion Transistors in 50 Years
  Microprocessors have improved by seven orders of magnitude—from 2,300 to 54 billion transistors—in only five decades. To illustrate these changes, we highlight a handful of industry-defining products.
  

• Apple Scales M1 GPU to the Max
  Apple’s M1 Max processor delivers a massive boost in integrated-graphics performance compared with the original M1, offering throughput similar to that of Nvidia’s top-end laptop GPU card.
  

November 8, 2021

• Pixel 6 Packs Semicustom Processor
  For the first time, Google designed the main processor in its flagship smartphone. The Tensor SoC is based on a Samsung design but integrates Google’s AI accelerator and image processor (ISP).
  

• R-Car S4 Boosts Connected-Car Safety
  The Renesas R-Car S4 serves as a vehicle’s central networking hub, but it also integrates ASIL-capable application CPUs, real-time CPUs, and safety microcontrollers along with multiple hardware security features.
  

• Syntiant Grows Into Computer Vision
  Following its success in low-power wake-word detection, Syntiant has expanded into computer vision with its newest chip. The NDP200 can handle simple video tasks such as presence detection.
  

November 1, 2021

• Alder Lake Steals Gaming-CPU Crown
  Intel’s Core i9-12900K chip delivers a double-digit performance advantage over AMD’s fastest Ryzen processor. To do so, it runs at a sweltering 241W while using new superfast DDR5 DRAM.
  

• Marvell 5nm Switch Handles 5G RAN
  Marvell’s first Ethernet switch built in 5nm technology is for carrier access rather than data centers. The Prestera DX7321 joins the DX73xx family, which handles Ethernet speeds up to 400Gbps.
  

• Cadence HiFi Family Adds a Little One
  The new Tensilica HiFi 1 DSP consumes less die area and power than the popular HiFi 3 but adds new instructions that improve performance on Bluetooth 5’s Low Complexity Communication Codec (LC3).
  

October 25, 2021

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

More Articles

Purchase an Article