Hero banner

categories

HOT TOPICS

innovation

Eric Benhamou: The Saga Of Palm (Part 3)

Posted on Friday, Sep 14th

After a year of relative stability, Palm faced the market crash concurrently with a failed product launch. The combination of stock market problems and operational failure created a bad situation which was compounded by a lack of innovation in product development. SM: Did the stock price sustain for a bit? The market started going bonkers

Read Full Article »

Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 17)

Posted on Wednesday, Sep 5th

SM: Whom did you sell the high end product line to? EB: We sold it to Extreme. We put Extreme in business. It was a bad decision because the analysis was wrong. It was taken in an overheated period, by an over impatient board who were comparing ourselves with companies whose growth rate was inflated

Read Full Article »

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

Posted on Wednesday, Aug 29th

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 ā€œPā€ is programmability. There, we have done some

Read Full Article »

The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 9)

Posted on Tuesday, Aug 28th

I am curious how Anant addresses the intellectual property strategy for Tilera. In the back of my mind is the story of Tessera, a company that has had fundamental innovations in chip scale packaging, and today every single manufacturer of miniaturized consumer devices violate their patent, and pay them royalties. Some of the innovations that

Read Full Article »

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

Posted on Monday, Aug 27th

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

Read Full Article »

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

Posted on Sunday, Aug 26th

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

Read Full Article »

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

Posted on Saturday, Aug 25th

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

Read Full Article »

The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 5)

Posted on Friday, Aug 24th

Here we delve into a discussion of the differences between multiprocessor and multicore architectures. Multicore is when you put multiple processors on a single chip. But you still need to overcome bus bottlenecks. SM: So multicore does not use the traditional packaging? AA: Not really. In multiprocessors, for example, at Alewife we built a machine

Read Full Article »