
AMD’s new Zen 5 CPU boasts a 16% IPC increase over Zen 4, with significant performance gains in math-intensive tasks owing to doubled AVX throughput. A tighter physical design allows for similar die size despite increased cache and wider execution units. The new microarchitecture widens both the front end and back end and will be… continue reading

MediaTek is developing an Arm-based server processor and an associated data-center AI accelerator (NPU) according to Taiwan’s Economic Daily (經濟日報). The thinly sourced article states the TSMC-fabbed 3 nm chips will begin production in 2H25. But is the story believable? continue reading

Graphcore was among the first companies to address data-center AI acceleration and raised more than $700 million. It reported revenue of $10 million in 2019 but less in subsequent years. Sequoia Capital wrote down its stake in 2023, discouraging other investors from pumping in more cash to carry Graphcore through its incubation phase. Willing to continue reading

Initially a supplier of low-cost 8-bit microcontrollers (MCUs), Microchip Technology has since evolved its portfolio and grown by acquisition. Still emphasizing low-cost chips, it now offers quad-core, 64-bit microprocessors (MPUs). The new PIC64GX processors integrate four RISC-V CPUs and peripherals such as DRAM, Gigabit Ethernet, USB, and PCIe controllers. A fifth CPU monitors the chip continue reading

Every few years someone realizes that many small CPUs on a chip have many times the peak performance of a single small CPU. Unfortunately for the companies that pursue this idea, this approach is rarely (if ever) better than fewer, more powerful cores or specialized engines. Nonetheless, Inspire Semiconductor continues down this extreme-multicore path and continue reading

“If transformers go away…we’ll be hosed,” Etched CEO Gavin Uberti told Bloomberg in March. Last week Etched received $120 million to develop its Sohu NPU, promising a chip 10× faster than the Nvidia Blackwell GB200 and 20× faster than a Hopper H100 on Llama-3 70B and other transformer-based AI models. Articles online have raised the continue reading
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