Atmel made its name with programmable logic and nonvolatile memory, but the company is now a big supplier of microcontrollers, too. It’s one of the earliest and oldest ARM licensees, and this week the company announced an interesting new ARM-based processor chip that might move Atmel to the front of your shopping list. The new … Read More → "Atmel SAM3U Boasts Screaming USB"

For those of you old enough to remember, “Let’s get small” was a line that got big laughs. Nowadays it’s a serious business plan. Small, light, and power-efficient chips are all the rage. Especially the power-efficient part. Hypermiling hybrid owners have nothing on today’s microprocessor designers, who are wringing every last erg out of every … Read More → "Clash of the Tiny Titans"

Multicore processors are upon us, but how much do they really help? If your boss were to ask you right now, “how much faster will our code run on a two-, four-, or eight-core processor” could you answer the question? How many of us have any idea how much performance we’d gain by moving from … Read More → "Playing “What If…” With Multicore Processors"

To no one’s great surprise, there’s yet another new ARM chip available in the market. This time the perpetrator is Toshiba, and its lyrically named TMPM330FDFG is a new low-cost microcontroller based on the Cortex-M3 processor design. The new chip marks Toshiba’s first step into the world of ARM Cortex-M3 processors. The company has certainly … Read More → "Toshiba Grows a Prefrontal Cortex"

Ounce for ounce, silicon chips are more valuable than gold. A tiny fleck of Intel Core 2 Duo processor silicon sells for hundreds of dollars per gram, versus about $10/gram for pure gold. A single typical microprocessor chip contains millions of transistors, making it one of the most complex things ever devised by humankind. About … Read More → "Software Sells Processors"