Displaying posts in the categoryProcessors
Processors articles
Semiconductor Manufacturing
A processor can pass wafer sort, final test, system-level test and burn-in, go into a server, and then return a wrong answer from an ordinary instruction. No machine check fires and no log line appears. The program carries on with a bad number. Meta described one such case in which a CPU core calculated a file size as zero, and files went missing from a database as a result. Google, Meta and Alibaba have now published enough data to show that …
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 05, 2026
Semiconductor Business
In September 2025 Nvidia agreed to buy $5 billion of Intel common stock and to co-develop several generations of data centre and PC products with it. Intel will build custom x86 CPUs for Nvidia's AI platforms and x86 PC chips that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets, linked over Nvidia's NVLink. The deal gives Intel capital and a marquee partner, gives Nvidia a way into the x86 world it does not control, and puts pressure on AMD and on A…
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Murugavel Ganesan
September 22, 2025
Semiconductor Business
Tech Trendspotter , June 2025 New players can win in automotive microcontrollers with RISC-V by picking a narrow, fast-growing niche, building on licensable cores and safety-ready IP rather than designing everything from scratch, and closing the software and functional safety gaps that make car makers cautious. RISC-V removes the architecture licence fee and the dependence on a single CPU vendor, but it does not remove the cost of ISO 26262 ce…
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 19, 2025
Tutorials
A System on a Chip (SoC) is a single integrated circuit that holds most of the parts of an electronic system: processor cores, graphics, memory controllers, on-chip memory, connectivity and dedicated accelerators, all joined by an on-chip interconnect. Putting them on one die makes a device smaller, cheaper to build in volume and far more power-efficient than the same functions spread across separate chips. That is why the phone, watch, car dash…
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 05, 2025
Technology
An automotive microcontroller (MCU) is a single chip with a processor, on-chip flash and RAM, and peripherals such as ADCs, timers, PWM and CAN or LIN controllers, built to run one control job in a vehicle reliably for fifteen years or more. MCUs sit inside nearly every electronic control unit (ECU), from seat motors and window lifts to brakes, airbags, battery management and motor inverters. What sets them apart from consumer chips is functiona…
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Murugavel Ganesan
April 19, 2025
Video
Virtual memory is a memory management technique in which every program sees its own private, contiguous address space, while the operating system and the processor's memory management unit (MMU) map those virtual addresses onto physical RAM in fixed-size blocks called pages. It lets many programs run at once without overwriting each other, lets a program use more memory than is physically free by keeping some pages on disk, and avoids the fr…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 09, 2024
Video
RISC-V is an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) based on Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) principles, which favour a small, simple and regular instruction set. Anyone can implement it without paying an ISA licence fee, and it is modular and extensible, so designers can pick only the extensions they need and add their own custom instructions. That is the main difference from x86, which is controlled by Intel and AMD, and from Arm, wh…
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Murugavel Ganesan
December 24, 2023
