The iPad may already be hitting its midlife crisis. According to financial insiders at JP Morgan Chase, component suppliers and manufacturing partners are being told to scale back their orders for the fourth quarter of this year. If true, that would be the first time that iPad production levels have gone backward.

The cutback is hefty, too: down 25%, from a planned 17 million iPads to just 13 million units. This amid widespread accolades for the latest iGizmo and a lack of any serious competitors. If the iPad was losing ground to, say, HP, IBM, or Amazon tablets that … Read More → "iPad Leveling Off?"

A recent Intel keynote speech noted that the cost of one transistor is less than the cost of the ink in the period dot at the end of a sentence.

Astounding. Semiconductor transistors are one of humankind’s most amazing inventions, yet they’re more plentiful than grains of rice.

I wonder if there are heat issues with stacking memory die like that?

Micron Technology, America’s one-and-only memory manufacturer, has come up with a cool and unusual new type of memory chip. Well, it’s not really a chip. It’s more like a module. It’s a cube, actually.

The company calls it a “hybrid memory cube” (HMC) and it starts out as a set of stacked die within one package. That’s not terribly unusual in itself; plenty of companies have stacked two or more silicon dice on top of each other, and the technique is especially useful for memories. But the HMCs use Read More → "Micron’s Memory Cube"

It fascinates me when we ship products in numbers that exceed the number of humans on the planet. The stats you’re giving mean that the average man, woman, and child in the western world probably has a double-digit number of microcontrollers.

Most of them don’t even know they have any at all.

We looked at many-core processors recently, and one of the big issues with scaling up the processor count is memory access: if all of those cores need access to the same memory, then that bandwidth becomes the bottleneck. Which makes SMP with many cores very difficult without shared distributed memory structures.

Netlogic has just announced their XLP II family, following on the heels of their XLP processors that have been around for a while. XLP devices go up to 32 CPUs; XLP II goes up … Read More → "Netlogic Integrates Families"

This is unbelievable.. doesn’t the VP of Engineering at IC Manage have something better to do than troll around competitor websites buying up domains and posting lies and disinformation? Just plain sleaze.. why would anyone do business with a company like this?

We recently took a look at multicore software automation, and one of the efforts in play was the generation of so-called “recipes” for helping parallelize a program. The idea is that a tool from Vector Fabrics helps you decide how to parallelize a sequential program, and then you get a set of instructions that tell you how to transform your program into a parallel version.

Typically this is done by inserting pthread or OpenMP constructs. But Vector Fabrics recently announced a new … Read More → "Multicore with GPUs"