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AMD Appears To Be Pushing It’s Boltzmann Plan
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Troubled chipmaker AMD is putting a lot of its limited investment money into the “Boltzmann Initiative” which is uses heterogeneous system architecture ability to harness both CPU and AMD GPU for compute efficiency through software.
VR-World says that stage one results are finished and where shown off this week at SC15. This included a Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC); a headless Linux driver and HSA runtime infrastructure for cluster-class, High Performance Computing (HPC); and the Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability (HIP) tool for porting CUDA-based applications to C++ programming.
AMD hopes the tools will drive application performance from machine learning to molecular dynamics, and from oil and gas to visual effects and computer-generated imaging.
Jim Belak, co-lead of the US Department of Energy’s Exascale Co-design Center in Extreme Materials and senior computational materials scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said that AMD’s Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability enables performance portability for the HPC community.
“The ability to take code that was written for one architecture and transfer it to another architecture without a negative impact on performance is extremely powerful. The work AMD is doing to produce a high-performance compiler that sits below high-level programming models enables researchers to concentrate on solving problems and publishing groundbreaking research rather than worrying about hardware-specific optimizations.”
The new AMD Boltzmann Initiative suite includes an HCC compiler for C++ development, greatly expanding the field of programmers who can leverage HSA.
The new HCC C++ compiler is a key tool in enabling developers to easily and efficiently apply the hardware resources in heterogeneous systems. The compiler offers more simplified development via single source execution, with both the CPU and GPU code in the same file.
The compiler automates the placement code that executes on both processing elements for maximum execution efficiency.
Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/amd-appears-to-be-pushing-its-boltzmann-plan.html
GPU Shipments Appear To Be On The Rise
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Beancounters at JPR have been adding up the numbers and dividing by their shoe size and worked out that GPU shipments are up for both Nvidia and AMD.
Over the last few months both have been busy with new releases. Nvidia has its GeForce GTX 950 and GTX 980 Ti, while AMD put its first HBM-powered cards in the Radeon R9 Fury X, Fury and the super-small R9 Nano into the shops.
According to JPR, overall GPU shipments are up quarter-over-quarter – with AMD’s overall GPU shipments up 15.8 per cent. But before AMD fanboys get all excited by a surprise return to form from AMD, JPR said that that NVIDIA “had an exceptionally strong quarter”. Nvidia saw an uptick of 21.3 per cent.
The PC market as a whole increased by 7.5 per cent quarter-over-quarter but decreased 9 per cent year-over-year. Nivida’s discrete GPU shipments were up 26.3 per cent according to JPR, while AMD’s discrete GPUs spiked by 33 per cent.
AMD’s mobile GPU shipments for notebooks increased by 17 per cent, while NVIDIA had 14 per cent.
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/gpu-shipments-appear-to-be-on-the-rise.html
Will UMC Chip Shipments Drop In The Fall?
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Foundry UMC is expecting its shipments to fall by five percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, as a result of ongoing inventory adjustments within the industry supply chain.
Revenues for the last part of the year will be adversely affected by an about one per cent drop in wafer ASPs and capacity at its plants will slide to 81-83 per cent in the fourth quarter from 89% in the third.
UMC’s had already lowered capacity in the third quarter. At the beginning of the year it was running at 94 percent.
The company’s revenues decreased 7.1 per cent to $1.07 billion in the third quarter, with gross margin slipping below 20 per cent.
UMC net profits were down 62.9 per cent on quarter, as both operating and non-operating income eroded. This is bad news because in the first three quarters of 2015, UMC’s net profits increased 35.8 per cent from a year earlier.
However UMC is continuing to invest in new capital and will spend $1.8 billion.
CEO Po-Wen Yen said that the continuing IC inventory adjustment will dampen fourth quarter wafer shipments, but UMC continues on the path towards long-term growth.
“Throughout 2015, UMC engineers and Fab12A have worked tirelessly to bring several new 28nm product tape-outs into volume production. “UMC is working to bring a timely conversion of new 28nm requirements into production, which will strengthen our business.”
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/will-umc-chip-shipments-drop-in-the-fall.html
Verizon Goes IoT
Verizon has rolled out ThingSpace, a development platform for companies of all sizes to create Internet of Things applications more efficiently and then later manage those apps.
The carrier also announced it is creating a new dedicated network core for IoT connections that can scale far beyond the ability of its existing networks with the intent to reach billions of sensors and devices.
“Continued innovation in smart cities, connected cars and wearables demonstrates that IoT is the future for how we will live and work,” said Mike Lanman, senior vice president of enterprise products at Verizon during an event held at Verizon’s San Francisco Innovation Center. He said Verizon is taking a “holistic approach” to help expand the IoT market from millions of connections to billions. The event was webcast.
Other major wireless carriers, including AT&T, are developing programs to offer a range of services to industries and cities for connecting IoT sensors to wireless networks and then to cloud services for data analysis.
At Verizon, Lanman said the company is working to lower the cost of connecting billions of existing devices that companies have used for years to Verizon’s network. Holding up a new computer chip made by Sequans Communications, an LTE chip maker, he said the chip will provide a “significant reduction in cost…that changes the game.” It will provide 4G LTE connectivity in modules connected to IoT devices to “make the wide-area network more accessible to developers.”
Also, next year Verizon will launch a new IoT core network within its LTE network to provide a “much lower cost” than with Verizon’s existing wired and wireless networks.
“The cost for an IoT module and the cost to connect will both drop dramatically,” Lanman added. “Whether you are connecting your dog or water meters and any other low-payload devices, we’ll handle it through a new IoT core.”
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/consumer-category/verizon-launches-thingspace-for-iot-development.html
Sony To Acquire Toshiba’s Sensor Business
November 4, 2015 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Toshiba Corp is offload its image sensor business to Sony Corp for around 20 billion yen ($164.68 million) as part of a restructuring plan laid out earlier this year, sources with knowledge of the deal said on Saturday.
Toshiba, whose businesses range from laptops to nuclear power, is undergoing a restructuring after revelations this year that it overstated earnings by $1.3 billion going back to fiscal 2008/09.
Image sensors, which are used in digital cameras and smartphones, are part of Toshiba’s system LSI semiconductor business. Toshiba plans to sell its image sensor manufacturing plant in Oita, southern Japan, and pull out of the sensor business altogether, said the sources, who declined to be identified.
The sale is likely to be finalized soon, the sources said.
Toshiba is considering several options for its system LSI semiconductor business and its discrete semiconductor business and that debate is ongoing, a Toshiba official said when contacted.
An official from Sony declined to comment.
Masashi Muromachi, who became Toshiba’s CEO following the accounting scandal, has promised to restructure lower-margin businesses.
The deal for the image sensor business would be the beginning of the restructuring, Nikkei reported earlier on Saturday.
Sony is already a dominant player in the image sensor market, with its products used in phones made by China’s Xiaomi and India’s Micromax Informatix Ltd.
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/consumer-category/sony-to-acquire-toshibas-sensor-business.html
Will AMD’s Newest SoC Save The Company?
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The troubled chipmaker AMD thinks it is onto a winner with its new AMD Embedded R-Series SOC processors.
Designed for demanding embedded needs, the processors incorporate the newest AMD 64-bit x86 CPU core (“Excavator”), plus third-generation Graphics Core Next GPU architecture, and better power management for reduced energy consumption.
AMD tells us that combined, these chips provide industry-leading graphics performance and key embedded features for next-generation designs. The SOC architecture enables simplified, small form factor board and system designs from AMD customers and a number of third party development platform providers.
What AMD brings to the party is its graphics and multimedia performance, including capability for hardware-accelerated decode of 4K video playback and support for the latest DDR4 memory.
Jim McGregor, principal analyst, TIRIAS Research said that AMDs push into x86 embedded platforms is paying off with an increasing number of customers and applications.
“There is a need for immersive graphics, high-quality visualization, and parallel computing in an increasing number of embedded applications. Across these fronts, the AMD Embedded R-Series SOC is a very compelling solution.”
Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Embedded Solutions said that his outfit’s AMD Embedded R-Series SOC is a strong match for these needs in a variety of industries including digital signage, retail signage, medical imaging, electronic gaming machines, media storage, and communications and networking.
“The platform offers a strong value proposition for this next generation of high-performance, low-power embedded designs.”
The new AMD Embedded R-Series SOCs offer 22 percent improved GPU performance when compared to the 2nd Generation AMD Embedded R-Series APU2 and a 58 percent advantage against the Intel Broadwell Core i7 when running graphics-intensive benchmarks.
AMD released some of the specs for its integrated AMD Radeon graphics including:
Up to eight compute units4 and two rendering blocks
GPU clock speeds up to 800MHz resulting in 819 GFLOPS
•DirectX 12 support
Fully HSA Enabled
The AMD Embedded R-Series SOC was architected with embedded customers in mind and includes features such as industrial temperature support, dual-channel DDR3 or DDR4 support with ECC (Error Correction Code), Secure Boot, and a broad range of processor options.
It has a configurable thermal design power (cTDP) allows designers to adjust the TDPs from 12W to 35W in 1W increments for greater flexibility.
The SOC also has a 35 percent reduced footprint when compared to the 2nd Generation AMD Embedded R-Series APU, making it an excellent choice for small form factor applications.
AMD said that the range is the first embedded processor with dual-channel 64-bit DDR4 or DDR3 with Error-Correction Code (ECC), with speeds up to DDR4-2400 and DDR3-2133, and support for 1.2V DDR4 and 1.5V/1.35V DDR3.
Its dedicated AMD Secure Processor supports secure boot with AMD Hardware Validated Boot (HVB) and initiates trusted boot environment before starting x86 cores
It has a high-performance Integrated FCH featuring PCIe Gen3 USB3.0, SATA3, SD, GPIO, SPI, I2S, I2C, and UART
The AMD Embedded R-Series SOC provides industry-leading ten-year longevity of supply. The processors support Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Embedded 7 and 8 Standard, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and AMD’s all-open Linux driver including Mentor Embedded Linux from Mentor Graphics and their Sourcery CodeBench IDE development tools.
It will be interesting to see if AMD can make up the ground it has lost on PCs and higher ticket items. Most of the company still appears to be in a holding pattern until Zen arrives.
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/will-amds-newest-soc-save-the-company.html
ARM’s Mali GPU Going To Wearables
ARM has announced the Mali-470 GPU targeted at Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices.
The new Mali-470 GPU has half the power consumption and two times the energy efficiency of the Mali-400, and is designed for next-generation wearables and IoT devices such as industrial control panels and healthcare monitors that rely on low-cost and low-power chips.
The Mali-470 supports OpenGL ES 2.0, used by Android and Android Wear, hinting that the GPU could also find its way into low-cost smartphones. If not, ARM promises that the chip will bring smartphone-quality visuals to wearable and IoT devices, supporting screen resolutions of up to 640×640 on single-core devices, and higher resolutions for multi-core configurations.
ARM envisions the new GPU paired with its efficient Cortex-A7 or A53 CPU designs for a low-power SoC.
“ARM scrutinises every milliwatt across the entire SoC to enable OEMs to optimize energy efficiency and open up new opportunities,” said Mark Dickinson, vice president and general manager of ARM’s multimedia processing group.
“Tuning efficiency is particularly relevant for devices requiring sophisticated graphics on a low power budget such as wearables, entry-level smartphones and IoT devices. The Mali-470 has been designed to meet this demand by enabling a highly capable user interface while being extremely energy efficient.”
ARM expects the first SoCs using the GPU be ready by the end of 2016, meaning that the chip will start showing up in devices the following year.
The launch of the Mali-470 GPU comes just hours after ARM announced plans to pick up the product portfolio and other business assets of Carbon Design Systems, a supplier of cycle-accurate virtual prototyping solutions.
The deal will see Carbon’s staff transfer to ARM, where the chip firm will make use of the Massachusetts-based outfit’s expertise in virtual prototypes. This will enable ARM to iron out any bugs and make improvements to chips before they move to foundries for production.
ARM also said that Carbon will help the firm enhance its capability in SoC architectural exploration, system analysis and software bring-up.
Courtesy-TheInq
AMD’s Bet On ARM Does Is Not Working
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Buried in the AMD results was a note which seemed to hint that AMD’s plan to flog ARM based server chips was not going very well.
Chief executive Lisa Su admitted that ARM-based server chips have experienced slower-than-expected reception from the owners of data centres and server farms.
AMD delayed its own ARM-based Opteron microprocessor, code-named Seattle, until the fourth quarter of this year. ARM was having a harder time proving itself to the multibillion-dollar market for high-end server chips.
An engineering sample of AMD’s long awaited 8 core server SOC code named “Hierofalcon” has been spotted and tested and according to WCCTech it looked pretty good. Itis based around 8 ARM-64bit A57 cores running at 2.0Ghz. And although Hierofalcon maxes out at frugal TDP of 30W.
So even the promising reviews aren’t enough for AMD to be optimistic about the ARM based gear.
Su said in an analyst conference call that the company expects to see “modest production shipments” of Seattle in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, AMD’s Intel-compatible “x86″ server chips will be the company’s mainstay product offering for data centres.
She said that AMD was continuing its ARM efforts and is seeing them as a longer term bet.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/amds-bet-on-arm-does-not-appear-to-be-helping.html
Semiconductor Sales Still Down In 2015
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Semiconductor Sales Still Down In 2015 : :: TheGuruReview.net ::
Sales of semiconductors have remained sluggish during 2015 and look set to drop still further in 2016, according to new research from Gartner.
Last quarter, 2.5 percent growth was expected for 2015, but this has been revised down to a one percent drop in the market. 2016 remains predicted to see a 3.3 percent drop.
“We are continuing to see weakness in end-user electronics demand in response to an uncertain economic environment, which is putting a dampener on 2015 spending,” said Takashi Ogawa, research vice president at Gartner. “Next year we are anticipating DRAM manufacturers to respond to oversupply with dramatic reductions in their investment plans.”
The drop likely comes off the back of weak PC sales too, with Gartner last week revealing that, despite the release of Windows 10, sales of devices slumped 7.7 percent in the third quarter.
The future looks brighter, though, and figures for 2017, 2018 and 2019 show significant growth with the losses of 2015 more than recovered as soon as 2017.
A number of key companies, including Intel, have cut spending in the past quarter against a backdrop of slow demand for electronics. This has led in some cases to semiconductor plants significantly shrinking production to avoid a surplus of obsolete chips in the fast evolving industry.
“In the DRAM market, weak end-market conditions combined with new foundries coming on line at Samsung and SK Hynix have created a weaker market than anticipated in our last forecast,” said Ogawa.
“As a result, we anticipate that DRAM manufacturers will move more quickly from investing in new capacity to a maintenance and upgrade existing capacity mode of operation.”
Meanwhile, NAND memory has actually moved to a small predicted growth of 0.1 percent against a 19.4 percent drop predicted last quarter. The rise of NAND thanks to alliances such as the one between SanDisk and HP has led Gartner to predict a 10 percent shift from DRAM to NAND in the next six months or so, while DRAM manufacturers will begin to slow investments around this time next year.
The news comes after reports that SanDisk is looking to consolidate its business by putting itself up for sale to another market player. WD and Micron are said to be likely buyers.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/semiconductor-sales-still-down-in-2015.html
Is AMD Losing Top Scientist To nVidia?
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AMD is reeling after the high profile exit of one its top CPU brains Phil to rival Nvidia.
The outfit has been going through hell lately. Last month AMD ace CPU architect Jim Keller stepped away from the company after completing his work on Zen.
Rogers was one of AMD’s high-ranking technology and engineering corporate fellows, and been responsible for helping to develop the software ecosystem behind AMD’s heterogeneous computing products and the Heterogeneous System Architecture.
He was a public figure for AMD and active on the software development and evangelism side, frequently presenting the latest HSA tech and announcements for AMD at keynotes and conferences.
While he is not the only person working on the software side of HSA at AMD, Rogers’ role in its development is important. Rogers was a major contributor to the HSA Foundation, helping to initially found it in 2012. He served as the Foundation’s president until he left AMD.
It seems his defection was kept secret, and took place sometime this quarter and did not manage to leak.
According to his LinkedIn profile Phil Rogers is now Nvidia’s “Chief Software Architect – Compute Server” which is similar to what he was doing over at AMD. Nvidia is not a member of the HSA Foundation, but they are currently gearing up for the launch of the Pascal GPU family, which has some features that overlap well with Phil Rogers’ expertise.
Pascal’s NVLink CPU & GPU interconnect would allow tightly coupled heterogonous computing similar to what AMD has been working on. It makes a fair bit of sense for Nvidia to bring over a heterogeneous compute specialist makes a great deal of sense.
Rogers’ departure from AMD will have to be mentioned on the earnings call on the 15th. AMD’s Gregory Stoner will probably replace him. Stoner is AMD’s current Senior Director of Compute Solutions Technology and long-time Vice President of the HSA Foundation.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-amd-losing-top-scientist-to-nvidia.html