Semiconductor news and analysis on Web Pulse: 113 curated articles tracking the latest Semiconductor developments, tools, and research, updated continuously from vetted sources.
The Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, released in the 1980s, could accelerate floating-point calculations on IBM PCs by up to 100 times using complex algorithms implemented in microcode. The chip contains a microcod…
At the Supercomputing 2025 conference, Cornelis Networks CEO Lisa Spelman discussed the company's OmniPath architecture, a high-performance networking solution for HPC and AI workloads that was originally developed at In…
Nvidia's Blackwell B200 GPU is the company's first chiplet design, using two reticle-sized dies that appear as a single GPU to software, moving away from the monolithic approach used in prior generations like Hopper. The…
The z8086 is a compact, FPGA-friendly 8086/8088 processor core that runs original Intel microcode by loading a recovered 512x21 ROM, rather than hand-coding individual instructions. Written in about 2,000 lines of System…
At Supercomputing 2025, EuroHPC, AMD, and Eviden announced the Alice Recoque supercomputer, which will use AMD's upcoming Instinct MI430X GPUs to achieve over 1 Exaflop/s of sustained HPL performance while consuming less…
The Intel 8087, introduced in 1980, was a floating-point coprocessor that performed calculations up to 100 times faster than early microprocessors, significantly benefiting IBM PC applications like AutoCAD and spreadshee…
The article announces the release of an interactive online browser for the 8086 microprocessor's microcode ROM, created by the author after studying the original chip's design. The tool decodes every 21-bit micro-instruc…
This article evaluates the performance impact of NPS0 (Uniform Memory Access) mode on a dual-socket AMD EPYC 9575F system, provided by Verda (formerly DataCrunch). The analysis reveals that while NPS0 simplifies programm…
This article is a beginner-friendly guide to diagnosing and fixing AMD GPU issues on Linux, particularly for RDNA3 (RX 7000 series) cards. It explains common symptoms like system freezes and "fence timeout" errors, ident…
The Intel 386 processor, introduced in 1985 with 285,000 transistors, used standard cell logic—an automated place-and-route technique—to meet its production schedule after falling behind. The article examines unusual cir…
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite is a new system-on-chip for Windows on ARM, featuring 18 CPU cores (12 "Prime" and 6 "Performance") with Prime cores clocking up to 5.0 GHz. The Oryon Gen 3 cores include a wider 9-wide dec…
AMD's Strix Halo mobile processor uses a 32 MB Infinity Cache as a GPU last-level cache to balance high bandwidth demands with power efficiency, supported by a 2 MB L2 cache and 256 KB L1 per shader array. The Infinity C…
The article evaluates the Infinity Cache in AMD's Strix Halo mobile chip (Ryzen AI MAX series), which combines a 16-core Zen 5 CPU with a 20-WGP RDNA 3.5 GPU and 32 MB of memory-side cache. The author uses programmable p…
AMD's Strix Halo is a high-performance chiplet APU announced at CES 2025, designed for mobile devices with a TDP range of 55W to 120W. It features up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, a 40-core RDNA 3.5 iGPU, and a 256-bit LPDDR5X-…
The article describes the release of 486Tang v0.1, a port of the ao486 MiSTer PC core to the Sipeed Tang Console 138K FPGA board, marking the first time this core has been adapted for a non-Altera FPGA. Key architectural…
The article describes how Diné weaver Marilou Schultz created a rug depicting the internal circuitry of the 555 timer integrated circuit, using thick white lines for metallic wiring, a black background for silicon, and r…
The article summarizes the reverse-engineering of the Intel 386 processor's input/output (I/O) circuits, which protect the chip from static electricity, latchup, and metastability. It details how specialized protection d…
A CT scan of Intel's 1986 386 processor revealed that its ceramic package contains six layers of complex internal wiring, including two separate power and ground networks for I/O and CPU logic. The scan also showed nearl…
The article explains the process of reverse engineering an analog integrated circuit using the Philips TDA7000 FM radio receiver chip as an example. It describes how to identify key components like bipolar transistors, r…
The 386 processor, introduced by Intel in 1985, used a 16-byte instruction prefetch queue to improve performance by fetching instructions from memory before they were needed, taking advantage of idle memory bus cycles. T…