Semiconductor Engineering: Sweeping Changes Ahead For Systems Design

Kurt Shuler Vice President of Marketing at Arteris IP is quoted in this new article in Semiconductor Engineering:

Sweeping Changes Ahead For Systems Design

July 29th, 2021 – By Ann Steffora Mutschler

Demand for faster processing with increasingly diverse applications is prompting very different models.

“It’s not about the hardware instruction set architecture,” said Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP. “It’s about the software for the hardware instruction set architecture. This is why if you look at the x86 ISA, one of the reasons it’s still around today is because so much software has been created for it. With Arm, and others, you’ve had to create this stuff in it. Once it reaches a certain inflection point, things go nonlinear. I don’t know that we’re there just yet, but things are getting there. A shift is happening, and what this means, big picture, is that in terms of integration of companion chips to these x86 chips, generally they’re not in the same package because it’s an Intel chip product oftentimes going into an Intel or AMD motherboard. Then there is a PCIe card with the accelerator, so you’re kind of limited by what PCIe can give you. When things go to the Arm side, these guys aren’t just saying they’re going to have a whole bunch of Arm cores and it’s just going to be CPUs. They say, ‘We’re doing this because there are custom functions that we want to do — maybe search algorithms or otherwise that we want to do more efficiently than we can with the x86 server with a whole bunch of PCIe cards.’ They’re innovating, but they’re innovating in the chip.”

To read the entire SemiEngineering article, please click here: https://semiengineering.com/sweeping-changes-ahead-for-system-architectures/