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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

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 Case Studies

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As we’ve all heard, the cost of creating a custom chip has skyrocketed. Still, there are applications where a custom chip is justified—usually by specialized, demanding technical requirements. Today, custom chips often incorporate multiple processor cores. The choice of a

March 22, 2012 |

Posted in Benchmarks, Low-Power, Processors, Software Development

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Intel has been striving to shoehorn the x86 CPU architecture into handheld communications and computing devices ever since the company began publicly discussing the Atom architecture in late 2007 . First- and second-generation Atom-based CPUs and associated core logic chipsets found predominant

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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