2009

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response: NVIDIA GPUs Turn Up the Heat

December 16, 2009 |

In October of 2007, I wrote a column called “ When Worlds Collide ,” which was about NVIDIA’s emerging strategy of offering “general-purpose GPUs.” At the time, I thought it was interesting that NVIDIA had begun to move beyond graphics applications to target

December 16, 2009 |

Posted in Processors

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This month MIPS introduced two new cores, the M14K and M14Kc, that are based on a new instruction set architecture called microMIPS. MicroMIPS uses a mixed-width 16/32-bit instruction set to improve code density relative to the MIPS32 instruction set architecture. In general, processors

December 16, 2009 |

Posted in Case Studies

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Energy consumption is a chief concern for most embedded applications, especially for portable applications where battery life is paramount. In these applications, an accurate understanding of energy consumption is critical to processor selection and to system design. Unfortunately, many

December 16, 2009 |

Posted in Processors, Tools

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This month CEVA announced significant improvements to its software tool suite. Collectively, the new tools and features are dubbed the CEVA Application Optimizer, and are part of the CEVA-Toolbox software development suite. CEVA describes these capabilities as providing an

November 18, 2009 |

Posted in Communication, Processors

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This month both Texas Instruments and Tilera announced new multicore chips. TI announced the TMS320C6472, which includes six ‘C64x+ processor cores running at 500-700 MHz (depending on the family member). Tilera announced a new chip family, the TILE-Gx, which will include variants

Quartics Announces Flexible Video Chip

November 18, 2009 |

Posted in Processors, Video

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This month fabless semiconductor start-up Quartics introduced the QV1721, a video coprocessor SoC targeting applications such as netbook PCs, set-top boxes and high-definition televisions. The QV1721 is intended to be used to offload demanding video tasks from the main CPU in a system. The

November 18, 2009 |

Posted in Case Studies

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The economy is finally recovering—sort of—and a number of tech companies are planning long-delayed product launches. But over the last year, the technical trade press that covers these announcements has been decimated. There are a lot fewer tech reporters now, and those that remain

November 18, 2009 |

Posted in Opinion

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In the last decade most companies in the electronics industry have invested significant efforts in streamlining their design, testing, and manufacturing processes. Time-to-market pressures are intensifying; engineers and technical support staff often work overtime to meet product deadlines.

October 21, 2009 |

Posted in Opinion, Processors

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The beauty of digital signal processing is that it enables people to convert available processing power into cool new features, better performance, and lower power in their products. There are countless examples, including MP3 players, wireless communications of all kinds, medical imaging, and

October 21, 2009 |

Posted in Case Studies

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Let’s face it: Applications are getting more complicated. Chips are getting more complicated. And engineering teams are generally getting smaller, not larger. As a result, it’s incumbent on chip vendors to provide robust, easy-to-use development kits. Design

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2009