SoCs
This week at ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference), Microsoft presented a talk titled ‘Xbox Series X SoC: A Next Generation Gaming Console’, with hardware engineer Paul Paternoster presenting. The 30 minute presentation covered a lot about Microsoft’s latest console processor, most of which was a repeat about what we saw at Hot Chips in August last year, however there was a new element in this presentation talking about how the console design team balanced acoustics, power, thermal performance, and processor yield, discussing where the hotspots in the design originate and where the performance/power targets of the final silicon were optimized.
AnandTech at Hot Chips 30: Our 2018 Show Coverage
The last couple of days have been a whirlwind of coverage at two key events: Hot Chips, the semiconductor industry conference regarding new product designs, and some minor thing...
59 by Ian Cutress on 8/21/2018Hot Chips 2018: NVIDIA Xavier SoC Live Blog (5pm PT, Midnight UTC)
NVIDIA has a couple of talks during Hot Chips, with this first one going into the Xavier SoC.
5 by Ian Cutress on 8/20/2018Hot Chips 2018: SMIV DNN SoC for IoT Live Blog (4pm PT, 11pm UTC)
A slightly different talk from Hot Chips this time: here's a neural network processor aimed at IoT devices based in 16nm. The slides look interesting, so we're covering this...
5 by Ian Cutress on 8/20/2018Hot Chips 2018: AMD APU Optimization Live Blog (Noon PT, 7pm UTC)
AMD is also at Hot Chips, speaking about Raven Ridge and its APUs. The key elements to this talk will be the optimizations made for Raven Ridge, specifically around...
10 by Ian Cutress on 8/20/2018Hot Chips 2018: Samsung’s Exynos-M3 CPU Architecture Deep Dive
As part of this year’s first conference talks at HotChips 2018 at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino, California, we’ve had the pleasure to finally hear...
45 by Andrei Frumusanu on 8/20/2018Hot Chips 2018: The Google Pixel Visual Core Live Blog (10am PT, 5pm UTC)
Hot Chips has started! One of the first talks today is from Google, detailing the Pixel Visual Core processor found in the latest Pixel smartphones. The talk is called...
14 by Ian Cutress on 8/20/2018Qualcomm Reveals The Snapdragon 670 Platform: Dual Big Cores + Adreno 615
Today Qualcomm is announcing a new entry in the 600-series mid-range line-up. In a surprise move, the new Snapdragon 670 is a direct successor to the Snapdragon 660, and...
25 by Andrei Frumusanu on 8/8/2018More Details About the ZhongShan Subor Z+ Console, with Custom AMD Ryzen SoC
One of the exciting elements from last week’s coverage was the announcement of the upcoming Chinese market PC and Console, from Zhongshan Subor, featuring some AMD custom silicon. Through...
36 by Ian Cutress on 8/6/2018AMD Creates Quad Core Zen SoC with 24 Vega CUs for Chinese Consoles
AMD has cornered the x86 console market with its handy semi-custom mix of processors and graphics. While we slowly await the next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony...
58 by Ian Cutress on 8/3/2018Alldocube X Tablet Launching Mid-August
While the Android tablet market doesn’t seem to be very exciting these days, Chinese manufacturer Alldocube has announced a new tablet which looks pretty nice, yet fits into the...
13 by Brett Howse on 8/1/2018MediaTek Launches Helio A Series SoCs, Starting With Helio A22
Following the success of their Helio P and X series SoCs, MediaTek this morning is announcing a third SoC family to complement the existing pats: the Helio A series...
10 by Ryan Smith on 7/17/2018An AnandTech Exclusive: The Jim Keller Interview
You asked for it, and we were able to get 30 minutes with the big man himself. Jim Keller falls into the rockstar category of engineers: lots of ideas...
129 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 7/16/2018Marvell Completes Acquisition of Cavium, Gets CPU, Networking & Security Assets
Marvell on Friday announced that it had completed its takeover of Cavium. The combined company will have a broad portfolio of IP and patents that promise to enable the...
15 by Anton Shilov on 7/9/2018Arm and Samsung Extend Artisan POP IP Collaboration to 7LPP and 5LPE Nodes
Arm and Samsung Foundry this week announced plans to extend their collaboration to 7LPP and 5LPE process technologies. Under the terms of the agreement, Arm will offer Samsung Foundry...
23 by Anton Shilov on 7/6/2018Qualcomm’s Server Team Loses VP of Technology, Centriq Future Unknown
Normally we don’t particularly comment on these sorts of transitions at big companies unless they are C-level (CEO, CTO), however the narrative surrounding Qualcomm’s Centriq product line is still...
34 by Ian Cutress on 7/6/2018MIPS Acquired by AI Hardware Vendor Wave Computing
After a year-long on-and-on search for a suitor, MIPS has finally found its partner. Today the company has announced that it’s being acquired by Wave Computing, an AI startup...
9 by Ryan Smith on 6/15/2018USB-IF and Fast Charging: New Standard Logo with Wattage Listed
When discussing industry standards, the sexy ones are involved around performance: if you can breathe PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0 into a sentence, people start listening. One of the...
28 by Ian Cutress on 6/13/2018Imagination Announces First PowerVR Series2NX Neural Network Accelerator Cores: AX2185 and AX2145
Since Imagination’s original announcement of the PowerVR Series2NX Neural Network Accelerator (NNA) last fall, the machine learning and AI “hype train” has not paused in the slightest. For the...
4 by Nate Oh on 6/8/2018Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 850: A Second Generation For Windows
Qualcomm’s big value-add to the laptop space last year, alongside running Windows on the company’s smartphone-focused Arm processors, was both battery life and mobile connectivity, promising performance, 20+ hours...
36 by Ian Cutress on 6/4/2018ARM Announces Mali-V76 Video Processor: Planning For the 8K Video Future
Alongside today’s 76-series CPU and GPU announcements from Arm, the company also has one last product announcement for the day. Joining Arm’s video processor family is a new encode/decode...
8 by Ryan Smith on 5/31/2018