Hi everyone, what are the most exciting IoT news from last February? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Ferrari partners with Qualcomm
Software is reshaping the world of automotive. Software-defined vehicles nowadays update their functionalities through over-the-air (OTA) software updates. Partnering with Qualcomm, Ferrari vowed to start exploring digital cockpit solutions for rich graphics and an immersive infotainment experience.
Intel invests in Risc-V
In the past decade, open-source and open standards have reshaped the world of technology and produced long-lasting results. RISC-V is a new paradigm for Open Source hardware, developing a free and open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The ISA holds the promise of increasingly rapid processor innovation through open standard collaboration.
Intel investment in RISC-V was one of the most intriguing headlines of last February. Intel’s support for the RISC-V ISA is a strong indication of its commitment to continued investments in open standards and collaboration.
Intel sets up $1 billion fund
Confirming its presence at the cutting-edge of innovation, this February Intel announced a new $1 billion fund to aid “companies building disruptive technologies “.
The vision for the fund is to accelerate Intel Foundry customers’ time to market and facilitate the adoption of modular design approaches spanning toolchains and innovative chip architectures. Among the support for the “full spectrum of chip architectures”, the press release mentioned x86, Arm and RISC-V. SiFive, the commercial entity behind RISC-V, also announced support for Intel’s fund, aiming to extend its open-standard mandate.
NVIDIA-ARM deal collapses
NVIDIA’s acquisition of Arm, announced in September 2020, was expected to reshape trillion-dollar industries and thrust innovations across the compute spectrum.
NVIDIA invented the GPU in 1999, ushering the growth of parallel computing for the decades to follow. Arm is at the forefront of computing, powering billions of devices and arguably the most relevant CPU architecture of the upcoming years. The two partners decided to conclude the Agreement because of “significant regulatory challenges” discouraging the fulfilment of the deal. Arm will now commence preparations for listing on the Nasdaq.
AMD acquires Xilinx
While one transaction terminated among regulatory challenges, another industry-shaking acquisition went through. Announced in October 2020, AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx poses them as the leading high-performance and adaptive computing company in the industry. AMD completed its acquisition in February 2022, broadening its spectrum of products, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and Adaptive SoCs.
Alder Lake N specs revealed
Although Intel has neither unveiled Alder Lake-N nor argued its market positioning, the new processors family is foreseen to power embedded systems for some years to come.
By analysing commits related to Alder Lake-N and boot logs in the SOF Project, one can expect Intel’s upcoming processors to include an integrated GPU with 32 execution units, PCIe interfaces and LPDRR5 memory support.
Arguably, the Gracemont cores with Intel UHD Gen12 graphics will result in optimized performance compared to Elkhart Lake and Jasper Lake processors.