The Hot Chips Conference, an annual show and tell for cutting edge hardware designers like as IBM, Intel and AMD, is being held at Stanford University this week. It featured multi-processor cores from startups and ultra high-speed wireless.
Beaverton, Oregon-based Ambric and Santa Clara based Tilera are just two of many new processor startups using novel parallel or configurable designs for applications like H.264 video encoding, says EE Times. “You lay out these cores much like you do tiles on a floor,” said Anant Agarwal, Tilera founder and chief technology officer. “By 2014, you will see a 1,000-core chip coming out.”
Tilera puts 64 fully fledged processor cores on a mesh and uses a fairly traditional model of software porting and optimization. Ambric uses a novel register design as a building bock for its 360 simplified RISC cores and the asynchronous communications channels that link them in its Kestrel chip.
CNet is blogging from the Hot Chips Conference (posts).
The Wireless session has two presentations–one from SiBeam describing wireless HDTV transmission for home use, the other from Broadcom on new 802.11n Wi-Fi technology.
SiBeam OmniLink60 chipset operates at 60GHz so there’s enough bandwidth for uncompressed HDTV, which needs about 4 gigabits per second (for 1080p60 video plus 8-channel 192KHz audio). As long as the signal gets from the transmitter to the receiver, you get every bit of the original program.
The 60GHz band provides 7GHz of RF bandwidth, and effective transmit power can be as high as 8 watts. SiBeam uses a channel width of 2.5GHz, making it relatively easy to squeeze in up to 4Gbps (by way of comparison, ATSC digital television fits 19.4Mbps into 6MHz). There’s also a 40Mbps digital back-channel so the video receiver can talk to the transmitter for configuration and security purposes.
Broadcom described 600Mbps networking using 802.11n with MIMO. This new standard uses more spectrum–up to 40MHz channels–and more complex encoding schemes that fit over 15 bits per second per hertz of bandwidth (compare that to the 3+ bits/s/hz for ATSC broadcasting, or the 1.6 bits/s/hz for the SiBeam product). Broadcom delivers about 200Mbps of real throughput in their current “N” chips.
The EE Times list of 60 Emerging Startups reflects the latest corporate, commercial, technology and market conditions.
