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Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Is the Long Tail Getting Longer for Chip Suppliers?

May 16, 2012 |

The phrase "the long tail" has come into prominence in the past few years to convey the concept that in some markets, a large number of niche products, each sold in low volume, can create a larger aggregate opportunity than that represented by a small number of blockbuster high-volume

May 16, 2012 |

Posted in Processors

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Processor core provider MIPS Technologies has seemingly fallen on hard times in recent years. Consider, for example, a report published by the Linley Group just last week that indicated chief competitor ARM supplied CPU cores used in 78% of the estimated 10 billion CPU cores in SoCs shipped last

May 16, 2012 |

Posted in Processors

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Jerry Sanders, AMD's brash former CEO, once opined, "Real men have fabs. These fabless guys are nobodies, just boys." In recent times, however, Sanders' comments seemed increasingly antiquated, with various foundries (most notably mighty TSMC) serving the fabrication needs of

May 16, 2012 |

Posted in Case Studies

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Lossy audio compression first came to the forefront with the release of the MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer III) format in 1993, followed shortly by MP3 support in PC-based software such as Winamp and in portable audio players. (The emergence of various file-swapping sites and services didn't hurt

April 24, 2012 |

Posted in Audio, Low-Power, Processors

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"If it's not broken, don't fix it." That well-known maxim seemed for many years to encapsulate CEVA's approach to audio DSP cores, given that the company's third-generation offering in this particular application space (and first-generation 32-bit core), the

April 24, 2012 |

Posted in Case Studies

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Back in August 2011, Jeff Bier's editorial " How to Make a Really Annoying Demo " neatly summarized the common attributes of poorly developed and executed product demonstrations that he'd auditioned over the years. Recently, Bier (and company) had the opportunity to show the

April 24, 2012 |

Posted in Opinion

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The "time value of money" – the fact that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow – is an intuitive concept deeply entrenched in our business culture. The "money value of time" also gets a lot of attention; it's generally recognized, for example,

April 24, 2012 |

Posted in Low-Power, Processors, Video

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It's a safe bet that when a chip company devotes precious development time and manpower, not to mention silicon area, to a specialized function, that company feels confident that it's going to get a notably positive return on its investment. Take Intel, for example, which embeds a video

March 22, 2012 |

Posted in Opinion

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Lately, it seems that DSP engineers are becoming scarce. Is this phenomenon limited to my local neighborhood? I don’t know. But whether it’s a local or a global phenomenon, I find it worrisome. DSP engineers have been critical to innovation in the electronics

March 22, 2012 |

Posted in Benchmarks, Communication, Processors, Software Development

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After some five years of architecture definition work and several years of development, Freescale's new StarCore SC3900 DSP core will see its first silicon implementation next quarter in the QorIQ Qonverge B4860 processor for macrocell base station designs, unveiled last month at the Mobile

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