The Week In Review: Sept. 18
By Ed Sperling
ARM introduced a 2GHz, dual-core version of its Cortex A9 embedded processor. Does that sound like the market dominated by Intel?
Yes is the correct answer. And that explains why Intel introduced a high-end SoC version of its Xeon processor aimed at embedded communications—one that comes with a small footprint and lower power. It’s one of ARM’s strongholds. There’s nothing like a good fight to get everyone in the holiday spirit.
And with the Intel Developer Forum on tap next week, you won’t have to wait long to see fireworks. Intel is already gearing up for battle, streamlining its internal organization by dividing the empire into two parts—products and manufacturing.
But in any reorg there are winners and losers—often for reasons that make no sense outside the company. (Sometimes they don’t even make sense inside the company, but that’s another matter.) Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s former CTO, a longtime company evangelist and one of the earliest proponents of IDF apparently didn’t see much of a role for himself in the newly reorganized Intel. He bowed out one week before IDF to take over a division at EMC, the enterprise storage and security company. He was still listed as one of the IDF keynoters until this week. Intel’s stock dropped on the news. Ouch.
Actel updated its Q3 guidance to investors. The new projection is that revenues will be flat to up 3%. That’s instead of the old guidance, of -2% to up 4%. It’s nice to see those negative numbers go, isn’t it? We may survive this downturn after all.
Chartered’s board recommended that the company be sold to ATIC International Investment Company, the Abu Dhabi government’s investment group, in an effort to raise necessary investment capital and to allow the foundry to achieve global scale. The board said the offer appeared to be “fair and reasonable.” No surprises here, other than the initial offer.
For anyone working on the manufacturability side of semiconductors, the joint deployment by Mentor Graphics and Applied Materials of the OASIS.MASK should represent a milestone in data reduction. OASIS, which stands for Open Artwork System Interchange Standard, reduces the size of mask data files by about half. That, in turn, speeds up manufacturing because just transferring that amount of data can slow systems down to a crawl.
Also on the manufacturing side, TSMC chose Synopsys’ HSIM simulator for its sub-40nm memory IP. The simulator will be used for timing, power simulation, dynamic IR drop and EM analysis.
Tags: Actel, Applied Materials, ARM, chartered, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys