Floorplanning

7nm Boosted Zen 2 Capabilities but Doubled the Challenges

February 21, 2020 David Schor 2 Comments 14 nm, 7 nm, AMD, capacitance, GlobalFoundries, ISSCC, ISSCC 2020, resistance, TSMC, wire delay, Zen, Zen 2

The transition to 7 nm greatly enhanced AMD silicon capabilities but introduced new drastic design challenges that required new place and route methodologies and wire engineering.

Architectures Floorplanning Mobile Processors

Ice Lake Brings A New CPU, GPU, IPU, and I/Os, To Follow By Tiger Lake Next Year

May 12, 2019 David Schor 4 Comments 10nm, 7nm, AVX-512, Gen11, Ice Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Tiger Lake

A look at Ice Lake mobile CPUs which bring a new CPU core, a new Gen11 GPU, and a new 4th Gen IPU as well the new roadmap detailed by Intel at their recent investor meeting which includes Xeon Sapphire Rapids CPUs and 7nm Xe Data Center GPGPUs for 2021.

Circuit Design Floorplanning IEDM 2018 Process Technologies

IEDM 2018: Intel’s 10nm Standard Cell Library and Power Delivery

January 6, 2019 David Schor 3 Comments 10nm, DTCO, floorplan, IEDM, IEDM 2018, place and route, power delivery, routing, standard cell

Presented at the 64th IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in December, here’s a look at Intel’s 10-nanometer standard cell library and power delivery system.

Architectures Floorplanning Hot Chips 30 Interconnects Server Processors

POWER9 Scales Up To 1.2 TB/s of I/O, Targets NVLink 3, OpenCAPI Memory for 2019

October 7, 2018 David Schor 0 Comments 14 nm, 14HP, A-Bus, Centaur, Hot Chips, Hot Chips 30, IBM, NVLink, OpenCAPI, POWER, Power ISA, POWER9, PowerAXON, X-Bus

A look at the IBM POWER9 scale-up design recently disclosed at Hot Chips 30 and their plans for a 3rd POWER9 derivative for 2019.

Architectures Floorplanning Hot Chips 30

Hot Chips 30: Nvidia Xavier SoC

September 8, 2018 David Schor 0 Comments 12FFN, 12nm, AI, ARM, ARMv8, inference, neural processors, Nvidia, NVLink, Tegra, Xavier

An overview of the Xavier SoC which was detailed by Nvidia at Hot Chips 30.

Architectures Circuit Design Floorplanning ISSCC 2018 Server Processors

ISSCC 2018: The IBM z14 Microprocessor And System Control Design

May 13, 2018 David Schor 5 Comments 14 nm, 14HP, A-Bus, floorplan, IBM, ISSCC, ISSCC 2018, mainframe, X-Bus, z/Architecture, z14

A look at the changes and enhancements that were implemented by IBM in their z14 mainframe microprocessor and system control chips.

Architectures Circuit Design Conferences Floorplanning Graphics Processors

A look at Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect and the NVSwitch

May 6, 2018 David Schor 0 Comments 12FFN, 12nm, AI, DGX-1, DGX-2, GPU, Interconnect, Nvidia, NVLink, NVSwitch, Pascal, Volta

A look at Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect and the 2-billion transistor NVSwitch that is powering Nvidia’s latest DGX-2 deep learning machine.

Architectures Circuit Design Floorplanning ISSCC 2018

ISSCC 2018: AMD’s Zeppelin; Multi-chip routing and packaging

March 24, 2018 David Schor 6 Comments 14 nm, 2D packaging, AMD, AMD's infinity fabric, EPYC, multi-chip package, Ryzen, x86, Zen

A look at AMD’s Zeppelin SoC and the Infinity Fabric, a multi-chip architecture used by AMD to scale their SoC design from the mainstream PC market all the way to the server market.

Architectures Circuit Design Floorplanning ISSCC 2018

ISSCC 2018: Intel’s Skylake-SP Mesh and Floorplan

March 9, 2018 David Schor 0 Comments 14 nm, floorplan, Intel, ISSCC, ISSCC 2018, Skylake, Skylake-SP, x86, Xeon Scalable

At ISSCC 2018 Intel gave us some more interesting architectural details of their latest Skylake server microprocessors which brought a new mesh interconnect, a new cache hierarchy, and wider vector operations among a large array of other enhancements.