Feature Articles
Intel Buys Its Own Caribbean Island
Last week Intel opened its sizable checkbook and offered to buy McAfee for $7.68 billion. And the world replied, WTF?
Seven billion, six-hundred-and-eighty million dollars is a big steaming pile of cash, no matter who you are. That’s Caribbean-island-with-gold-plated-faucets kind of money. Buying AMD would have been cheaper (though illegal). It’s as much capital as Microchip and NXP put together. It’s more cash than Xilinx or Altera is worth. It’s less money than NASA spent to go to the moon—seven times. You can buy Central American governments for that kind of money.
It’s also the largest acquisition, by far, that Intel has attempted in its 42-year history. By my reckoning, Intel has acquired more than 60 different companies over the years, but rarely paying more than a few hundred million. Last year’s acquisition of Wind River was a big one, at $884 million, but that’s still an order of magnitude cheaper than McAfee. This one purchase alone will cost almost half as much as all the others put together. Read More
AMD’s Bobcat Challenges Atom
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that’s so, Intel must be feeling pretty good right about now. Advanced Micro Devices (better known as AMD) has been producing terrific “imitation Intel” chips for two decades. The company’s latest chip design, code-named Bobcat, is AMD’s spin on Intel’s successful Atom chip.
Like Atom, Bobcat is a low-power x86 processor. Or, more accurately, it’s a low-power CPU core design. The actual chip is code-named Ontario, and it’s due out late this year. Ontario will be the first of many AMD chips to include the Bobcat CPU core, just as Intel produces several variations of its Atom processor.
Ontario will be different from Atom, though, because it will have integrated graphics. AMD acquired graphics-chip maker ATI a few years ago, and Ontario will be the first chip to include the AMD processor and the ATI graphics on the same chip. That makes Ontario more of a single-chip system than Atom is. It also makes it tough to compare the two chips side-by-side.
Lyric Semiconductor Debuts “Probability Logic”
The old joke has finally come true: the AND, OR, and XOR gates are finally being joined by the “maybe gate.”
Boston-based startup Lyric Semiconductor has taken the wraps off its “probability logic,” a new kind of digital circuit based on Bayesian, rather than Boolean, arithmetic. Although the phrase might sound iffy and unpredictable, a sort of rehash of fuzzy logic, Lyric’s gates are actually completely reliable and deterministic. The difference is that they integrate the likelihood of an input as well as its state. The company says its new class of logic is useful for error correction, Web searches, genome sequencing, and more.
Compared to a standard Boolean exclusive-OR function, Lyric’s is both superficially the same and fundamentally different. It takes two inputs and produces one output. So far, so good. But the output isn’t simply a true/false condition based on the instantaneous state of the two input bits. Instead, Lyric’s XOR determines the probability that its two inputs are true or false. In electronic terms, probability is based on the number of electrons flowing through the inputs—the current, in other words.
Oceans of Energy
It’s a neat trick: the switch for the light is a self contained unit, with no external wires or internal battery. Simply toggling the light switch generates enough power to send an RF signal to a control unit to turn on, or off, the light. More broadly, the switch could be a button, and the signal sent could be used to control almost anything.
The company behind this approach is EnOcean, a spin-off from Siemens based just to the south of Munich. The company philosophy is that there is an ocean of “free” energy that is just waiting to be exploited. Hence the name - En(ergy)Ocean. This energy is not just that generated by a mechanical means, including vibrations, but also includes light/solar energy or electricity generated by temperature difference.
Stretch Hides Mystery Technology
What would you call this thing? If you had some sort of microprocessor chip that could transmogrify its own instruction set, compress video, do network encryption, recognize bad guys’ faces, talk to DDR3 memory, and manage a cluster of disk drives… what would you call it?
If you’re Stretch Incorporated, you call it the S7. This all-singing, all-dancing device is the third generation of Stretch’s difficult-to-categorize chips, and it costs about $10 to $30, depending on which options you want and how many you buy. If you’re in the video-surveillance business (you know who you are), you call it a one-chip solution to your many hardware and software problems.
PowerPC: Twenty Years of Progress
They say power corrupts, but nobody told embedded-systems designers. The PowerPC processor family turns 20 years old this year, and it’s come a very long way from its beginnings in the first Power Macintosh in 1990. Today’s PowerPC has done a 180-degree turnaround: it’s no longer in Macs or any other desktop computers, but it’s going strong in embedded applications, especially networking and consumer electronics. PowerPCs are found in everything from spacecraft to Cisco routers to Ford and Jaguar engines to video games, including the “big three” of PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii.
Depending on how you count, PowerPC is the third most popular 32-bit embedded processor family, after ARM and MIPS. ARM seems to get all the glory, while MIPS and PowerPC mostly keep under the radar. Interestingly, all three were originally designed for computer systems, not embedded applications, yet it’s in embedded products that they’ve been most successful. There are no ARM- or MIPS-based computers anymore (unless you count tablets or netbooks), yet PowerPC processors still drive record-breaking supercomputers. Of all the RISC architectures, PowerPC has stayed truest to its roots, and it offers the broadest spectrum of performance from top to bottom.
Energy Micro Keeps Its Cool
What’s more important to you: price or power consumption? With a new series of cheap, low-power microcontrollers from Energy Micro, you may not have to choose.
This low-profile Norwegian company has been making and selling 32-bit ARM-based chips for more than a year, and the parts are remarkable both for their low price (under $2) and low power consumption (measured in nano-amps in some cases). Remarkably, the company has 22 different products on the shelf, an impressive achievement for such a young company.
You can tell right away this company is serious about energy consumption. It’s right in the name over the door. It’s also in the name of the chips, called EFM32 (for “energy-friendly micro 32 bits”). It’s even reflected in the company mascot, which is… um… a gecko. Maybe the geckos in Norway are very energy-efficient.
Faster than Reality
It better be fast.
Whatever it is, whatever it does, it’s all good as long as it’s fast.
We live for speed in our supercharged world. After all, we’ve gone from a society that used to survive on one breadwinner per family to a society with two breadwinners as the norm to the point where some people have to have multiple jobs just so they don’t fall behind. (Well, in the US, anyway.) So we’re busy. Very busy. And we have to toss Facebook updates and tweets in on top of that.
So we have to be able to do things fast.
And your boss promised something impossible to his boss who promised something even less possible to his boss and so on up to the CEO who promised something ridiculous to the Board so that the share price could hopefully go way up for at least a few days and make them a boatload of money. So it’s your responsibility to figure out how to make the impossible, nay, the ridiculous, happen. Now. You’re going to be a busy dude and it’s your fault if it doesn’t happen on time.
Stroke Me Gently
A recent personal column in an English newspaper commented that the London Underground was full of young men in suits “gently stroking their phones, as though they were small furry animals.” >p? The revolution in replacing buttons with a glass screen is only just beginning. In the last few weeks, I have seen a range of applications that have recently rolled out. One is used to improve the remote controller for audio-visual centres. My little office sound centre, with just a tuner and a CD, has a remote with 43 buttons on it. The controller for the digital terrestrial TV tuner, DVD player and PVR has 60 buttons and is heavy enough that it could fell an ox (should you ever wish to fell an ox). Yet with all these buttons you still have to resort to menus on the TV screen for a raft of actions. The touch-sensitive reference design I saw had an on-off button and a series of context-based screens with virtual sliders and buttons. My local electronics store fascinated a friend with a combined in-car GPS and terrestrial digital TV receiver with only a single on-off button.
Freescale Unrolls ARM Roadmap
How many microcontrollers can one company make? If you’re Freescale, the answer is, “billions.”
Hot on the heels of its ColdFire+ announcement (see ETJ, June 8, 2010), the big chipmaker from Austin has unleashed Kinetis, an entirely new line of ARM-based microcontrollers. Kinetis is sort of, maybe, kind of, a replacement for ColdFire in the company’s midrange microcontroller lineup… but not really. Like ColdFire, Kinetis chips are 32-bit embedded processors with on-chip flash memory, a useful mix of I/O peripherals, clock speeds in the 100–200 MHz range, and inexpensive single-digit prices. Unlike ColdFire, however, Kinetis is… well, it’s ARM-based. And that makes the chips attractive to a whole new audience.
Freescale isn’t pulling the plug on ColdFire by any means. Quite the contrary. As the ColdFire+ announcement shows, the company is putting a lot of effort into keeping those chips spry and lively in their sunset years. Kinetis is more of a partner to ColdFire than a replacement. A younger sidekick, if you will. Some embedded designers will prefer the familiarity of ColdFire, while others will choose the popular, sexy, ARM-based Kinetis chips instead.