Ron Wilson

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In the dark over networks

Once again a large piece of North America-this time the US southwest and part of northern Mexico-has suffered a power outage due to network instability. According to the Associated Press, an operator near Yuma, Arizona took a capacitor off-line, following correct procedures. We may infer from the absence of reports of vaporized technicians, flying fragments of switches, or columns of flame... More

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What is Fulcrum's real leverage?

At Hot chips last month Fulcrum Microsystems, purveyor of high-speed packet-switching ICs, made probably its last appearance as an independent company, delivering one last paper before the silicon gates of Intel clanged shut behind them. The paper described Alta, a 1 Gpacket/s packet-processing switch. And, in describing Alta’s development process, the paper also raised a fascinating... More

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Exploring the Xilinx Zynq: software platform, or complex FPGA?

One of the enduring challenges of FPGAs with embedded CPUs has been the connection between the processor and the programmable fabric. A conversation at Hot Chips earlier this month with Xilinx vice president Vidya Rajagopalan suggested that Xilinx’s forthcoming entry in this rather exclusive derby, the Zynq 7000, is to be no exception. There have been two dominant approaches to the... More

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Mentor, Calypto, Catapult C: is this an omen?

As more information emerges on Claypto’s acquisition of Catapult C from Mentor Graphics, the picture is growing increasingly complex. To begin with, this is not exactly an arm’s-length transaction. Mentor has been, and remains, a major investor in Calypto. So Mentor is not simply dumping the C-to-RTL synthesis technology in which it has invested so much; it will continue to have... More

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The serverless data center: reflections from Hot Chips

The old paradigm was simple: if you had a big job you chose a big CPU. But that notion has fractured along many different lines. Last week at Hot Chips, we saw that even when building the most compute-intensive systems, architects’ fancies are wandering away from the behemoth eight-issue, out-of-order, speculating while psychically branch-predicting, 29-stage CPUs. The new darlings are... More