News Analysis

A few days before Apple started selling the iPhone, I decided I wasn't going to buy one, and I said… Read more

Wednesday morning I visited the new Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters of Zonbu, makers of the low-cost, service-supported Linux computer I mentioned last month (here). I met with Zonbu CEO Grégoire Gentil, who gave me an overview of the company's business plan and a demo of the system. He also offered… Read more

This is the eighth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at wireless networking, technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

The second keynote here comes from Phil Hester, the chief technical officer at AMD. It's titled "Multicore and Beyond: Evolving the x86 Architecture."

He began by describing the… Read more

This is the seventh in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

This session has two presentations--one from SiBeam describing wireless HDTV transmission for home use, the other from Broadcom on new 802.11n Wi-Fi technology.

The SiBeam presentation is easily summarized: It describes a chipset that sends uncompressed HDTV video over… Read more

This is the sixth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

We began Tuesday morning with a session on assorted technology developments.

The first talk was from Sun Microsystems, about the company's Proximity chip-to-chip interconnect technology. Today, to put multiple chips in a package--a common technique in high-end servers, for example--each chip will be individually connected to the package substrate through conductive… Read more

This is the fifth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

I'm back for one last session today, a panel discussion on the topic of "What's Next Beyond CMOS?" The question refers to the common processes for making complementary metal-oxide semiconductors.

The panel includes many leading experts in the… Read more

This is the fourth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

The first talk in session 3 is from Advanced Micro Devices, describing the ATI Radeon HD 2900. (I checked, and AMD does still use the ATI brand name for some of its products; this is one of them.)

This is another chip I described briefly in one of my Siggraph 2007 pieces (here). The 2900 has 320 cores (which AMD calls "stream… Read more

Welcome back to the ongoing Speeds and Feeds coverage of Hot Chips 19 at Stanford. They give us comfy chairs and free Wi-Fi, so blogging about it is the least I can do. By the way, Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News is also blogging from Hot Chips, so you can get another perspective on the event here.

Session 2 is the first of two sessions of "Multi-Core and Parallelism" presentations. This one happens to be all about Nvidia. Session 3, up next, will include presentations about AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900, Intel's 80-core "Tera-Scale" processor, the TRIPS project at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Tile Processor from Tilera.

The first presentation in this session, "The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GPU," is an overview of that chip. As I mentioned in my Siggraph coverage, the 8800 includes 128… Read more

(This is the second post in a series written "live" from Hot Chips 19 at Stanford University.)

Vernor Vinge is best known as a science-fiction writer, but he's also a computer scientist; he retired from his professorship at San Diego State University five years ago. (I mentioned his participation in a panel at Siggraph earlier this month here.)

Vinge's talk was titled "Digital Gaia," a reference to the Gaia Hypothesis. (I see Vinge used the same title for a January, 2000 essay in Wired, here.) Vinge described several scenarios for the future of the integrated-circuit industry, building on some… Read more