When RISC-V International’s chairman of the board Krste Asanović took the stage to report on the state of the RISC-V union at last month’s RISC-V Summit, he mouthed the phrase that’s always said by the president of the United States when reporting the country’s state of the union: “The state of the union is strong.” Later in his talk, Asanović said the same thing, but in a much more assertive way: “All your cores are belong to us.” … Read More → "RISC-V Foundation’s Chairman says: “All Your Cores Are Belong to Us”"

Intel is placing many big bets on semiconductor process improvements, building new fabs and manufacturing plants around the world, new packaging technologies, and even software. One of those bets, or perhaps a group of bets, is oneAPI and Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), which are an open, cross-architecture programming model that frees developers to use a single code base across multiple architectures and a parallel-programming variant of … Read More → "Intel’s Gamble on oneAPI and DPC++ for Parallel Processing and Heterogeneous Computing: An Interview with Intel’s James Reinders"

I’ve been reading science fiction (SF) since the second grade. The first SF book that I read was “The Space Witch” by Don Freeman, which I promptly plagiarized. That book was published in 1959 and I read it a couple of years later. By fourth grade, I’d graduated to the Heinlein juveniles starting with “Have Space Suit Will Travel,” which psychically transported me out of my fourth-grade classroom … Read More → "I Was Mr. Spock’s Science Officer, For a Day"

The market for low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) used in IoT endpoint devices is fiercely competitive and not for the weak of heart. If you are a purveyor of such a low-power MCU, you have to have something really special to differentiate yourself and stand proud in the crowd. All of which leads us to…

…those clever chaps and chapesses at < … Read More → "Is Ambiq’s Apollo4 Plus the World’s Most Energy Efficient MCU?"

I have a tale to tell with so many fabulous facets that I’m hard pushed to know where to start. We could come at this from so many different directions. I’ll tell you what — let’s just bite the bullet, as it were, and plunge headfirst into the fray with gusto and abandon. So, pull up your socks and hold hard onto your hat. … Read More → "Artix UltraScale+ (Xilinx) + XEM8320 (Opal Kelly) = SYZYGY’s Time to Shine"

Moving targets are always harder to hit. That’s the underlying premise behind Morpheus, a CPU designed to stop malware dead in its tracks. It’s not a commercial product, but a university research project created specifically to take on a DARPA challenge for secure processors< … Read More → "Morpheus Processor Foils Attackers"