Why Move To 2nm?


Key Takeaways: Scaling digital logic still provides significant benefits, especially lower power. Multi-die assemblies will be the predominant approach, and most of the circuitry will not be 2nm or below. While these systems are inherently more flexible, the number and complexity of tradeoffs required for optimizing PPA/C are increasing. The rollout of 2nm process nodes and ... » read more

A Novel Side-channel Attack That Utilizes Memory Re-orderings (U. of Washington, Duke, UCSC et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Memory DisOrder: Memory Re-orderings as a Timerless Side-channel" was published by researchers at University of Washington, Duke University, UC Santa Cruz, Raytheon and Microsoft Research. Abstract "To improve efficiency, nearly all parallel processing units (CPUs and GPUs) implement relaxed memory models in which memory operations may be re-ordered, i.e., ex... » read more

MIT’s Survey On Accelerators and Processors for Inference, With Peak Performance And Power Comparisons


A new technical paper titled "Lincoln AI Computing Survey (LAICS) and Trends" was published by researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center. Abstract "In the past year, generative AI (GenAI) models have received a tremendous amount of attention, which in turn has increased attention to computing systems for training and inference for GenAI. Hence, an update to this survey is ... » read more

Unleashing Heterogeneous Compute: Lessons From Real-World System Design


At the Andes RISC-V CON Silicon Valley held in San Jose, California, in April 2025, Imagination Technologies and Baya Systems delivered a compelling presentation titled “Unleashing Heterogeneous Compute: Lessons from Real-World System Design.” This session, part of the developer track, showcased a joint demonstration leveraging Baya Systems’ WeaverPro CacheStudio software to model a... » read more

Will New Processor Architectures Raise Energy Efficiency?


Data centers continue to heat up as new processors consume more energy than ever before. Cooling is the primary weapon against the heat these processors generate, but it won’t be able to keep up forever with traditional processor architectures. New ones may be necessary. There are opportunities today to make well-known architectures more energy-efficient, but the number of options for subs... » read more

Fully Automated Hardware And Software Design Of Processor Chips (Chinese Academy Of Sciences)


A new technical paper titled "QiMeng: Fully Automated Hardware and Software Design for Processor Chip" was published by researchers at Chinese Academy of Sciences. Abstract "Processor chip design technology serves as a key frontier driving breakthroughs in computer science and related fields. With the rapid advancement of information technology, conventional design paradigms face three majo... » read more

RISC-V’s Increasing Influence


The industry is increasingly talking about benefits brought by the RISC-V architecture, but is it even the right starting point? While it may not be perfect, it may provide the flexibility necessary to move forward gradually. Computer architectures and software have followed in the footsteps of processors developed 80 years ago. They aimed to solve sequential, scalar arithmetic problems usin... » read more

Trapped By Legacy


At Quadric, we do a lot of first-time introductory visits with prospective new customers. As a rapidly expanding processor IP licensing company that is starting to get noticed (even winning IP Product of the Year!) such meetings are part of the territory. Which means we hear a lot of similar-sounding questions from appropriately skeptical listeners who hear our story for the very first time. Th... » read more

Increasing Design Flexibility With RISC-V-Based Processor IP


The semiconductor industry increasingly needs more flexible and scalable processor architectures, driving the growing adoption of RISC-V. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) has become very popular in recent years. RISC-V allows designers to customize their processor implementations to meet the specific needs ... » read more

CPU Performance Bottlenecks Limit Parallel Processing Speedups


Multi-core processors theoretically can run many threads of code in parallel, but some categories of operation currently bog down attempts to raise overall performance by parallelizing computing. Is it time to have accelerators for running highly parallel code? Standard processors have many CPUs, so it follows that cache coherency and synchronization can involve thousands of cycles of low-le... » read more

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