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SiFive, a company established by researchers who invented the RISC-V instruction set architecture in the University of California Berkeley several years ago, has this week announced two platforms which could be used to design semi-custom SoCs based on RISC-V cores. SiFive is the world’s first and yet the only company developing chips featuring the RISC-V ISA and it already has initial customers interested in designing SoCs for machine learning, storage, embedded, IoT and wearable applications. SiFive: World’s First Developer of Commercial RISC-V Chips RISC-V is an open-source microprocessor architecture developed by researchers in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and...

IBM today unveiled a breakthrough in semiconductor design and process with the development of the world's first chip announced with 2 nanometer (nm) nanosheet technology. Semiconductors play critical roles in everything from computing, to appliances, to communication devices, transportation systems, and critical infrastructure.Demand for increased chip performance and energy efficiency continues to rise, especially in the era of hybrid cloud, AI, and the Internet of Things. IBM's new 2 nm chip technology helps advance the state-of-the-art in the semiconductor industry, addressing this growing demand. It is projected to achieve 45 percent higher performance, or 75 percent lower energy use, than...

Last September, when Arm trotted out the Neoverse V1 design and made it available, the N2 design was not yet available. But as of this announcement, today, it is. Both the Ampere Computing Altra and the Amazon Web Services Graviton2 processors, which are the two production-grade Arm server chips in the market today, are based on N1 cores and platform designs, with various customizations...With the V1 platform, Arm is designing cores and the uncore regions of a hypothetical processor using either 7 nanometer or 5 nanometer processes, presumably either at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp or Samsung Electronics, which have fabs...

Shanghai Tianshu Intellectual Semiconductor Co. (Tianshu Zhixin) announced Wednesday that it's nearing "mass production and commercial delivery" of Big Island, China's first domestically produced 7nm general-purpose GPU (GPGPU). Tianshu Zhixin said in January that BI was made using an unidentified 7nm process node and 2.5D chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging. On Wednesday, it confirmed our suspicion that BI was made using TSMC's 7nm FinFET process. It also shared a little more information about what people can expect from BI when it starts to ship. Tianshu Zhixin claimed that BI offers "nearly twice the performance of mainstream manufacturers' products" at a lower power...

AAPL -0.12% SPX +0.20% DJIA +0.27% MSFT +0.30% Apple’s 4-for-1 stock split goes into effect at the close of trading Friday. In theory, stock splits like this one don’t mean much. If today you own 100 shares worth $500 each, on Monday you will have 400 shares worth $125 each. But it turns out that splits matter more than you’d logically think. The last Apple (ticker: AAPL) split was 7-for-1, in June 2014. There were 2-for-1 splits in February 2005, June 2000, and May 1987. Had Apple never split the stock, the current share price would be around $28,000. Apple...