
Thanks for reading this and my other notes. Extra gratitude to those who have signed up for my newsletter. Looking at the list, I think I know half of you! Here’s a hint at what I’m planning to do next and a request for you to send me ideas. continue reading

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
Amazon AMD Arm auto Broadcom business Cerebras Ceva consumer CPU data center DPU DSP edge AI embedded Epyc FPGA Google GPU Imagination Intel interconnect Marvell MCU MediaTek memory Meta MEXT Microsoft MLPerf NPU (AI accelerator) Nvidia OpenAI PC process tech Qualcomm Renesas RISC-V SambaNova Semidynamics SiFive smartphone software Tenstorrent Upscale