I'm on the organizing committee of a conference called Hot Chips. Our last conference included a very funny panel from a number of well known chip designers, analysts, and a legendary educator. You can see a shortened version of the panel here:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/video?id=562

Well, it's not quite a month since my last post. For all you Catholics out there, there will be a familiar ring to that admission.

So I need to keep this blog posting going. The problem, as usual, is time, compounded by short post on Twitter. Well, that plus the fact I have only one proven reader, maybe two. Well, that's a classic chicken and egg situation - I might get more readers if I posted regular and posted interesting things.

WRT to interesting things, there's a lot of interest in the "Godson" processor from the Chinese Academy of Science. Previous versions were just a MIPS-compatible processors for very low cost PC-like devices. But then everyone decided the low-cost PC model was actually a growth opportunity, so the market became more interesting (although the size is still questionable). On top of that, the Godson-3, introduced at Hot Chips 20, is designed with software emulation of the x86 instruction set in mind. The translation layer is still under development, but say the magic word "x86" and everybody wants to know about it and suddenly it's an Intel competitor. Not a place that I would strive for.

Well, it's still isn't available for testing, so we'll have to wait to see how good it is.