editor's blog
Subscribe Now

Main Event or Non-Event?

I had a nice talk with one of my favorite chip companies the other day. Two chip companies, in fact. Seems they’d developed some sort of new product and wanted to tell me about it. Okay. Sounds fun. Sign me up.

Except that the chip they described was already four years old.

Confused, I asked, “Uh, so what’s the news here? What are we announcing?”

“It’s our differentiating joint collaboration” was the answer. That set off all kinds of mental alarms. Warning: buzzword alert! Marketing hype incoming!

It seems that what the two companies had actually done was make Company A’s chip work better with Company B’s chip. Neither chip was new, and admittedly many engineers had used them together already. Nevertheless, both companies felt there was room for improvement.

On one hand, I felt like this was a non-event. Neither company had produced a new chip, or even much new software, so there was no “product” in the usual sense.

On the other hand, both sides had expended some real ergs in making the integration of the two chips go more smoothly, and that ought to be worth something. Even if we don’t know what problem(s) they were solving, they seem confident they’ve smoothed the path for us, and that deserves some credit.

What’s your view? Is this just marketing hand-waving or have these guys provided a real service?

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Jul 25, 2025
Manufacturers cover themselves by saying 'Contents may settle' in fine print on the package, to which I reply, 'Pull the other one'”it's got bells on it!'...

featured paper

Agilex™ 3 vs. Certus-N2 Devices: Head-to-Head Benchmarking on 10 OpenCores Designs

Sponsored by Altera

Explore how Agilex™ 3 FPGAs deliver up to 2.4× higher performance and 30% lower power than comparable low-cost FPGAs in embedded applications. This white paper benchmarks real workloads, highlights key architectural advantages, and shows how Agilex 3 enables efficient AI, vision, and control systems with headroom to scale.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

Simplifying Position Control with Advanced Stepper Motor Driver
In this episode of Chalk Talk, Jiri Keprda from STMicroelectronics and Amelia Dalton explore the benefits of the powerSTEP01 is a system-in-package from STMicroelectronics. They also examine how this solution can streamline overall position control architecture, the high level commands included in this solution and the variety of advanced diagnostics included in the powerSTEP01 system-in-package.
Jan 21, 2025
30,956 views