Vol 19, Issue 48

November 28, 2005

Busy Fall for MPR

By Kevin Krewell

We have just completed the 2005 edition of Fall Processor Forum and the first ever Microprocessor Forum Japan. Both events showed an interesting array of new processors and related technologies. At the Fall Processor Forum, we have continued to expand the focus of the occasion beyond new-processor announcements. This forum included presentations and keynotes from EDA vendors, software vendors, tools vendors, and unique intellectual property companies. We also took a remixed version of the Fall Processor Forum to Tokyo in partnership with Reed Business Japan. Our first Microprocessor Forum Japan went very well and has inspired us to return to Japan next year, possibly for two forums.

Fall Processor Forum 2005 marked the coming-out party for another stealth startup: P.A. Semi. (Our spring forum had been the launching pad for startup Raza Microelectronics.) While details of P.A. Semi's new microprocessor weren't revealed until our forum, the people driving the company's microprocessor development were well known to us and to our readers. Leading the company is processor guru Dan Dobberpuhl from Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), and the team includes other notable DEC alumni, such as Jim Keller and Peter Bannon.

If I may be permitted to toot our own horn for a moment, our forums have continued to provide an excellent opportunity for announcing new companies and for established companies to announce new products. The In-Stat forums offer a sharp audience and excellent press coverage.

A major change for us at the forums has been the inclusion of more software, system, and tool presentations, not just new chips and processor-core IP. At the fall forum, we had keynotes from Cadence and Microsoft, a special presentation from Azul Systems, and software-oriented talks from IBM, XenSource, Green Hills, AMD, and Freescale. We firmly believe that the industry cannot be focused on just the chip anymore (not that it ever was completely). In our post-forum evaluations, we found that most of the audience was enthusiastic about the new content, with good scores submitted for the Microsoft keynote on software concurrency design and for the XenSource and AMD Pacifica talks on virtualization technology. I can also offer the observation that XenSource seems to be a hot company to watch for server virtualization.

The Microprocessor Forum Japan content was largely based on the content delivered at the FPF, but both MPFJ keynotes were from Japanese companies (NEC and Toshiba) and specifically for the Japanese audience.

A presentation at Microprocessor Forum Japan. Photo by MPR

You should now circle May 15-18, 2006, on your calendars (or highlight those dates in your electronic calendar), as those will be the dates for Spring Processor Forum 2006. We will shortly be announcing plans for a spring event in Japan as well. We believe an interesting theme for the spring forum will be power-efficient design. The focus would not be just on low-power devices but also on managing power in high-performance processors and systems. Chip and system designers today have to make power-efficiency design trade-offs, and software designers must also be cognizant of power efficiency and participate in the intelligent management of power. We're considering one session in the program for chip designers on how to select the right semiconductor process for a design. Feedback from MPR readers on these proposed topics is highly encouraged!

In fact, if there's any suggestion for something you'd like to see in Microprocessor Report or in the forums, now is a great time to email me at Kevin.Krewell@reedbusiness.com with your suggestions. We'll be planning our 2006 content in early December and we would value inputs from our readers.

Microprocessor Report's Analysts' Choice Changes

In the past, we've nominated processors for our analysts' choice awards if the chip sampled during that year. But after the delay in shipping AMD's Athlon64 in late 2003 (after we awarded it best PC processor for 2002) and Intel's recently announced Montecito delay to next year, we have decided it would be better for all vendors and fairer to them if we changed the qualifications for our yearly awards. For this year's award, and in the future, we are changing our qualification to include only chips released for production shipments during the calendar year. (This change does not affect awards for IP cores.) In this way, we have a better understanding of the production-worthiness of the chip and its relative merit. And yes, I'm aware of the irony this change leads to: the winner of last year's analysts' choice for best server processor, Montecito, will likely not qualify for this year's award.

Introducing New MPR Editorial Board Members

After our previous announcement of the retirement of Nick Tredennick from the MPR editorial board, I'm happy to announce three new members of the board: Prof. Michael Flynn, Ph.D. (professor emeritus at Stanford University), Prof. Alan Jay Smith, Ph.D. (U.C. Berkeley), and Fred Weber (most recently CTO of AMD). Although you might think it took three people to replace Nick, each brings a unique background and perspective. I will be posting an official welcome notice in the newsletter shortly.