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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—NVIDIA GPUs Turn Up the Heat |
By Jeff Bier, 12/16/2009
In October of 2007, I wrote a column called “When Worlds Collide,” which was about NVIDIA’s emerging strategy of offering “general-purpose GPUs.” At the time, I thought it was interesting that NVIDIA had begun to move beyond graphics applications to target “high-performance computing” (HPC) applications like financial and seismic analysis, thus competing with processors outside of the GPU space. I also observed that the ubiquity of GPUs in PCs would likely help NVIDIA gain traction in non-GPU applications.
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| Case Study: Measuring Energy Consumption of Embedded Applications |
By BDTI, 12/16/2009
Energy consumption is a chief concern for most embedded applications, especially for portable applications where battery life is paramount. In these applications, an accurate understanding of energy consumption is critical to processor selection and to system design. Unfortunately, many obstacles hinder comparisons of processors’ energy consumption.
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| Multicore Heats up with Chip Announcements from TI, Tilera |
By BDTI, 11/18/2009
 Recently both Texas Instruments and Tilera announced new multicore chips. TI announced the TMS320C6472, which includes six ‘C64x+ processor cores running at 500-700 MHz (depending on the family member). Tilera announced a new chip family, the TILE-Gx, which will include variants with 16-100 cores running at 1.25-1.5 GHz. The ‘C6472 is available now, while Tilera does not expect to start sampling TILE-Gx chips until late 2010. According to Tilera, TILE-Gx chips will be fabbed in a 40 nm process. These announcements represent two of the common approaches to multicore today: putting a handful of processors that were originally designed for standalone use on a single die (TI) and creating a new architecture incorporating numerous cores (Tilera).
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| Quartics Announces Flexible Video Chip |
By BDTI, 11/18/2009
 This month fabless semiconductor start-up Quartics introduced the QV1721, a video coprocessor SoC targeting applications such as netbook PCs, set-top boxes and high-definition televisions. The QV1721 is intended to be used to offload demanding video tasks from the main CPU in a system. The chip provides high-definition video encoding, decoding, and transcoding functions, along with post-processing to improve perceived video quality.
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| Case Study: With Reduced Reporting, Product Announcements Must Really Pop |
By BDTI, 11/18/2009
The economy is finally recovering—sort of—and a number of tech companies are planning long-delayed product launches. But over the last year, the technical trade press that covers these announcements has been decimated. There are a lot fewer tech reporters now, and those that remain are often struggling to cover unfamiliar tech areas. They’re overworked and understaffed, and they don’t have time to decipher unclear marketing messages. If you want your product announcement to get attention and be accurately written up, you need marketing materials that are compelling, provide a good hook, and are crystal clear both from a technical and market standpoint.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—A Pain in the Procurement |
By Jeff Bier, 11/18/2009
In the last decade most companies in the electronics industry have invested significant efforts in streamlining their design, testing, and manufacturing processes. Time-to-market pressures are intensifying; engineers and technical support staff often work overtime to meet product deadlines. But there’s one task that is still typically slower than molasses in winter—and that’s procurement.
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| Synphony Synthesis Tool Takes MATLAB to RTL |
By BDTI, 10/21/2009
 High-level synthesis tools (i.e., tools that take high-level language code and generate an RTL-based hardware implementation) have been around a long time, but historically they have had limited success in the market. The primary problems have been that they have been hard to use and have generated relatively inefficient implementations. But their potential advantages are compelling, particularly as applications become more complicated: in the best case they can reduce implementation time and errors, and possibly reduce the need for RTL experts. For these reasons, a number of vendors have introduced high-level synthesis tools in recent years, including AccelChip (later acquired by Xilinx), Mentor Graphics, Cadence, AutoESL, and Synfora, among others. Most of these take C representations as inputs and synthesize them into RTL for FPGA or ASIC implementation, though some have promised MATLAB to RTL.
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| Case Study: Chip Vendors, Walk a Mile in Your Customers’ Shoes |
By BDTI, 10/21/2009
Let’s face it: Applications are getting more complicated. Chips are getting more complicated. And engineering teams are generally getting smaller, not larger. As a result, it’s incumbent on chip vendors to provide robust, easy-to-use development kits. Design engineers rely on these kits to quickly evaluate chips and prototype key portions of their systems.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Creative Tools Key to DSP on MCUs |
By Jeff Bier, 10/21/2009
The beauty of digital signal processing is that it enables people to convert available processing power into cool new features, better performance, and lower power in their products. There are countless examples, including MP3 players, wireless communications of all kinds, medical imaging, and voice recognition.
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