Designs that Move: Luis Barragan

I felt like doing another set of Designs that Move posts. So here are a few designs by Mexican architect Luis Barragan. “Beauty – the invincible difficulty that the philosophers have in defining the meaning of this word is unequivocal proof of its ineffable mystery.” Luis Barragán, Tlalpan Chapel, Mexico City

The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 14)

Here we discuss the current market environment, the competitive landscape with a focus on what current chips are being displaced by the multicore chips. SM: I read in the slides you sent me that you are expecting a TAM (Total Available Market) of $54 billion, is this based on the two markets we discussed –

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Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 12)

SM: Is this when you began to close the gap on Cisco? EB: There was one play that we used which enabled us to close in on Cisco, and we called it Boundary Routing. Cisco was driven to more complex solutions than us. They positioned routing as something of a magic art, very complicated and

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 11)

One of the greatest challenges with Massively Parallel Computing is Programmability. Anant explains Tilera’s approach to software and tools in more detail, and his “gentle slope programming” concept. SM: You created all of the tools from scratch, or did you base them on existing tools? AA: We invented all of this, and it is very

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 10)

Here Anant discusses his final area of innovation in Tilera, which is the piece which really supports their go-to-market strategy and allows companies to become early adopters of multicore processors. SM: What is the final innovation? AA: The fifth and final innovation is in software. The third “P” is programmability. There, we have done some

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 8)

SM: The market you are pursuing is embedded processors, so you do not really have demand for the fatter operating systems, such as Windows Vista. AA: Right, that is not where we are, but if for some reason that became important to a customer it would be done. Each processor core is full featured, so

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 7)

SM: This is a radical redesign, and it seems it should be advantageous in other areas as well, right? AA: True. The other beauty of the mesh is that not only does it solve the performance problem, it also really addresses the power problem. A bus is a big centralized structure, and any big centralized

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 6)

Anant identified five significant areas where innovation had to occur for multicore processors to really take off. He addressed each of these areas. Here we discuss the interconnect bottleneck issues in further depth. SM: So you are doing some set of pre-routing on a switch. AA: Exactly. Now that you have a switch on each

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