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X704
The x704 is a 32-bit PowerPC microprocessor developed in 1997 by Exponential Technology. The microprocessor was notable for its high clock frequency in the range of 400 to 533 MHz, its use of bipolar transistors for logic and CMOS circuits for memory, and its failure to see use in an Apple Macintosh, the opposite of what industry observers such as '' Microprocessor Report'' had expected. Exponential Technology eventually failed as a result of the x704's lack of success, but some of its former employees founded Intrinsity, a start-up that developed a high clock frequency MIPS implementation, FastMATH. Incidentally, Intrinsity was acquired by Apple in 2010 to aid in the development of their line of ARM microprocessors. The x704 is a superscalar microprocessor that issues up to three instructions per cycle to an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), floating-point unit (FPU) and branch unit. To realize the short cycle times, the caches were kept small, limiting its performance. There are th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PowerPC
PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM alliance, AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors. Originally intended for personal computers, the architecture is well known for being used by Apple's desktop and laptop lines from 1994 until 2006, and in several videogame consoles including Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, and Nintendo's GameCube, Wii, and Wii U. PowerPC was also used for the Curiosity (rover), Curiosity and Perseverance (rover), Perseverance rovers on Mars and a variety of satellites. It has since become a niche architecture for personal computers, particularly with A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apple Silicon
Apple silicon is a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture family, ARM architecture. They are used in nearly all of the company's devices including Mac (computer), Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, AirPods, AirTag, HomePod, and Apple Vision Pro. The first Apple-designed system-on-a-chip was the Apple A4, which was introduced in 2010 with the IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad and later used in the iPhone 4, fourth generation iPod Touch and second generation Apple TV. Apple announced its plan to Mac transition to Apple silicon, switch Mac computers from Intel processors to its own chips at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference#2020, WWDC 2020 on June 22, 2020, and began referring to its chips as Apple silicon. The first Macs with Apple silicon, built with the Apple M1 chip, were unveiled on November 10, 2020. The Mac lineup completed its transition to Apple chips in Jun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ball Grid Array
A ball grid array (BGA) is a type of surface-mount packaging (a chip carrier) used for integrated circuits. BGA packages are used to permanently mount devices such as microprocessors. A BGA can provide more interconnection pins than can be put on a dual in-line or flat package. The whole bottom surface of the device can be used, instead of just the perimeter. The traces connecting the package's leads to the wires or balls which connect the die to package are also on average shorter than with a perimeter-only type, leading to better performance at high speeds. Soldering of BGA devices requires precise control and is usually done by automated processes such as in computer-controlled automatic reflow ovens. Description The BGA is descended from the pin grid array (PGA), which is a package with one face covered (or partly covered) with pins in a grid pattern which, in operation, conduct electrical signals between the integrated circuit and the printed circuit board (PCB) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BiCMOS
Bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) is a semiconductor technology that integrates two semiconductor technologies, those of the bipolar junction transistor and the CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) logic gate, into a single integrated circuit. In more recent times the bipolar processes have been extended to include high mobility devices using silicon–germanium junctions. Bipolar transistors offer high speed, high gain, and low output impedance with relatively high power consumption per device, which are excellent properties for high-frequency analog amplifiers including low noise radio frequency (RF) amplifiers that only use a few active devices, while CMOS technology offers high input impedance and is excellent for constructing large numbers of low- power logic gates. In a BiCMOS process the doping profile and other process features may be tilted to favour either the CMOS or the bipolar devices. For example GlobalFoundries offer a basic 180 nm BiCMOS7WL process an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metal Oxide Semiconductor
upright=1.3, Two power MOSFETs in amperes">A in the ''on'' state, dissipating up to about 100 watt">W and controlling a load of over 2000 W. A matchstick is pictured for scale. In electronics, the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET, MOS-FET, MOS FET, or MOS transistor) is a type of field-effect transistor (FET), most commonly fabricated by the controlled oxidation of silicon. It has an insulated gate, the voltage of which determines the conductivity of the device. This ability to change conductivity with the amount of applied voltage can be used for amplifying or switching electronic signals. The term ''metal–insulator–semiconductor field-effect transistor'' (''MISFET'') is almost synonymous with ''MOSFET''. Another near-synonym is ''insulated-gate field-effect transistor'' (''IGFET''). The main advantage of a MOSFET is that it requires almost no input current to control the load current under steady-state or low-frequency conditions, e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floating-point Unit
A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. Modern designs generally include a fused multiply-add instruction, which was found to be very common in real-world code. Some FPUs can also perform various transcendental functions such as exponential or trigonometric calculations, but the accuracy can be low, so some systems prefer to compute these functions in software. Floating-point operations were originally handled in software in early computers. Over time, manufacturers began to provide standardized floating-point libraries as part of their software collections. Some machines, those dedicated to scientific processing, would include specialized hardware to perform some of these tasks with much greater speed. The introduction of microcode in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arithmetic Logic Unit
In computing, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a Combinational logic, combinational digital circuit that performs arithmetic and bitwise operations on integer binary numbers. This is in contrast to a floating-point unit (FPU), which operates on floating point numbers. It is a fundamental building block of many types of computing circuits, including the central processing unit (CPU) of computers, FPUs, and graphics processing units (GPUs). The inputs to an ALU are the data to be operated on, called operands, and a code indicating the operation to be performed (opcode); the ALU's output is the result of the performed operation. In many designs, the ALU also has status inputs or outputs, or both, which convey information about a previous operation or the current operation, respectively, between the ALU and external status registers. Signals An ALU has a variety of input and output net (electronics), nets, which are the electrical conductors used to convey Digital signal (electroni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Superscalar
A superscalar processor (or multiple-issue processor) is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single instruction per clock cycle, a superscalar processor can execute or start executing more than one instruction during a clock cycle by simultaneously dispatching multiple instructions to different execution units on the processor. It therefore allows more throughput (the number of instructions that can be executed in a unit of time which can even be less than 1) than would otherwise be possible at a given clock rate. Each execution unit is not a separate processor (or a core if the processor is a multi-core processor), but an execution resource within a single CPU such as an arithmetic logic unit. While a superscalar CPU is typically also pipelined, superscalar and pipelining execution are considered different performance enhancement techni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MIPS Architecture
MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, Inc. developed by MIPS Computer Systems, now MIPS Technologies, based in the United States. There are multiple versions of MIPS, including MIPS I, II, III, IV, and V, as well as five releases of MIPS32/64 (for 32- and 64-bit implementations, respectively). The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit; 64-bit versions were developed later. As of April 2017, the current version of MIPS is MIPS32/64 Release 6. MIPS32/64 primarily differs from MIPS I–V by defining the privileged kernel mode System Control Coprocessor in addition to the user mode architecture. The MIPS architecture has several optional extensions: MIPS-3D, a simple set of floating-point SIMD instructions dedicated to 3D computer graphics; MDMX (MaDMaX), a more extensive i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry required to perform the functions of a computer's central processing unit (CPU). The IC is capable of interpreting and executing program instructions and performing arithmetic operations. The microprocessor is a multipurpose, Clock signal, clock-driven, Processor register, register-based, digital integrated circuit that accepts binary code, binary data as input, processes it according to instruction (computing), instructions stored in its computer memory, memory, and provides results (also in binary form) as output. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential logic, sequential digital logic, and operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system. The integration of a whole CPU on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intrinsity
Intrinsity, Inc. was a privately held Austin, Texas based fabless semiconductor company; it was founded in 1997 as EVSX on the remnants of Exponential Technology and changed its name to Intrinsity in 2000. It had around 100 employees and supplied tools and services for highly efficient semiconductor logic design, enabling high performance microprocessors with fewer transistors and low power consumption. The acquisition of the firm by Apple Inc. was confirmed on April 27, 2010. Products Intrinsity's main selling point was its Fast14 technology, a set of design tools implemented in custom EDA software, for using dynamic logic and novel signal encodings to permit greater processor speeds in a given process than naive static design can offer. Concepts used in Fast14 are described in a white paper: and include the use of multi-phase clocks so that synchronisation is not required at every cycle boundary (that is, a pipelined design does not require latches at every clock cycle); '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microprocessor Report
''Microprocessor Report'' is a newsletter covering the microprocessor industry. The publication is accessible only to paying subscribers. To avoid bias, it does not take advertisements. The publication provides extensive analysis of new high-performance microprocessor chips. It also covers microprocessor design issues, microprocessor-based systems, memory and system logic chips, embedded processors, GPUs, DSPs, and intellectual property (IP) cores. History and profile ''Microprocessor Report'' was first published in 1987 by Michael Slater (engineer). Original board members included Bruce Koball, George Morrow, Brian Case, John Wakerly, Nick Tredennick, Bernard Peuto, Rich Belgard, Dennis Allison, and J H Wharton all of whom served for many years. Slater left MicroDesign Resources (MDR), at the end of 1999. Slater's company MDR, based in Sebastopol, California, originally published ''Microprocessor Report.'' MDR also hosted an annual conference, the Microprocessor Forum, and r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
