Intel Developer Forum August 2005 coverage

The Intel Development Forum got tons of press. Intel is running away from the "most gigahertz" school of CPU design because of the stifling problems of power management. I'll link the best articles with IDF coverage here:

• Intel Developer Forum August 2005 full coverage
• Intel abandons GHz war, embraces cool future | The Register

NVIDIA scientist calls for expanded research into parallelism

Update: this article in BYTE magazine (subscription required) describes how Intel really wants programmers to write parallel code.

This EE Times report from the Hot Chips conference, NVIDIA scientist calls for expanded research into parallelism, raises one of the "dirty little secrets" of all the hype about multi-core CPUs -- it is hard to make applications multi-threaded! Do we already have a good programming language for describing an application's parallelism, or is a new language needed?

Meanwhile, those working in the graphics arena are ideally suited to taking advantage of Moore's Law:

Kirk contrasted this situation against the entirely different structure inside the GPU. "Graphics has been called embarrassingly parallel," he said. "In effect, each stage in our pipeline, each vertex in the scene and each pixel in the image is independent. And we have put a lot of effort into not concealing this parallelism with programming."

This allows a GPU developer to simply add more vertex processors and shading engines to handle more vertices and more pixels in parallel, as process technology allows. "We are limited by chip area, not by parallelism," Kirk observed.

Xbox 360 Die Photos

Ever wonder what's in the chips that power the most powerful game consoles? Well, Xbox 360: New Tech Specs Details Surface - Xbox has die photos of both the CPU and GPU for you to oogle.

Each of these contains more transistors than an AMD Atlon64 CPU. There is a lot of power (both computing and electrical) in these chips!

EDA pioneer takes startup to new routing ground

EDA pioneer takes startup to new routing ground is a nice glimpse of this history of John Cooper, an old-time EDA guru, and looks to the future at a new type of router that his startup is developing.

I like the article more for this history than any insight I have into their new router's prospects. Also very impressive is the amount of money that Cadence paid to acquire CCT. It would be really interesting to do an analysis of what EDA vendors have paid for acquisition, and what returns they got. How about Cadence's acquisitions of Ambit and HLD Systems? HLD in particular didn't see to last long.

The Dangers of Living with an X (Bugs Hidden in your Verilog)

The Dangers of Living with an X (Bugs Hidden in your Verilog) is a technical paper that is important for ASIC design and verification engineers. It's an exhaustive analysis of interpretation of the 'X' value in Verilog HDL. This detail is often misunderstood and can be dangerous in design. The paper was originally presented at SNUG. It says the author won the Technical Committee award. I'm surprised he didn't win additional awards -- it's one of the best ASIC design papers I've read.

Constructing the next transistor

Constructing the next transistor , in EE Times, is a superb article describing the technical challenges to building useful transistors below 65nm. It covers the physical and materials challenges that are arising, and how the solution to one problem (e.g., low leakage power) may aggravate another (high performance).

I'd love to have seen this illustrated with some pictures -- I wonder if the print edition has that? In any case, if you're a semiconductor engineer or scientist, you'll find this article worthwhile.

Why, it even makes me want to dust off my semiconductor textbooks to remember what's really going on inside a MOS transistor!

EDA Vendor Earnings Announcements

I admit I'm not a financial guru, but trounces seems like a strong word for "Cadence recognized net income of just $500,000, or $0.00 per share"!

UPDATE: Synopsys will announce their 3Q2005 earnings on August 17.

• Cadence Trounces Guidance Again
• Magma Reports Fiscal Q1 Sales Up 8% The fourth largest EDA tool supplier reported record high revenue of nearly $39 million for the fiscal quarter ended July 3.
• Mentor Q2 Sales, Earnings Fall Due to lower than expected bookings, the third largest EDA player saw both revenue and earnings per share fall, but remains positive for future growth for new and emerging products.