HotChips Sneak Peak at Sponsors: AMD, Nvidia, TSMC
We are about 3 weeks away from this year’s HotChips all-virtual conference! Let’s take a closer look at some of our sponsors this year - AMD, Nvidia and TSMC - who are each having blockbuster years in their own ways.
AMD is coming off a blockbuster year; since we last saw them at HotChips 2020, they have announced their intent to acquire fellow semiconductor company Xilinx, and landed a marquee cloud computing win with Google Cloud. At HotChips 2021, AMD intends to demonstrate how it continues to deliver innovation across its product portfolio - through its foundational, high-performance computing architectures. On the Sunday tutorial day - the day before the kick-off of the official conference program - representatives from the company will be shining a spotlight on the packaging and techniques used for putting multiple chiplets on a substrate. On day one of the main conference, we are promised an in-depth look at the “Zen 3” core design. The latest iteration of the now famous “Zen” x86 architecture delivers up to 19% more instructions-per-clock (IPC) vs. the previous generation, according to AMD. The company will lift the hood on the latest CPU engine to describe how this impressive uplift in performance was obtained. Subsequently, on day two, we will get to glimpse at the company’s latest graphics architecture, AMD RDNA™ 2. AMD RDNA 2 represents the newest iteration of the AMD graphics engine architecture, featuring a much higher frequency design and an innovative high density and high-capacity cache, delivering greater effective bandwidth than traditional interfaces. We will learn how the new GPU architecture is driving gaming and visual experiences to new heights!
Nvidia has also been on a tear, with its stock climbing 53% in the first half of 2021, and is no slouch in the mega-merger arena, having announced its intent to acquire ARM from SoftBank, and closed on its acquisition of Mellanox technologies in the last year. On Day 1 of the main program at HotChips 2021, in the Infrastructure and Data Processors section, Nvidia will be discussing the Blufield-3 Data Processing Unit (DPU) for accelerated networking, which is a critical element of their full-stack data center platform, along with of course their GPUs. This talk will include an overview of DPU’s architecture, as well as examples showing how Infiniband delivers maximum scalability for massive multi-node workloads.
TSMC’s revenues and stock prices have also hit record highs in 2020; most recently, the company’s advanced3nm node has been tapped by Intel and Apple, the N5A node has been announced with bespoke enhancements for automotive workloads, and the company expects global supply chain issues to resolve by Q3 this year. At HotChips 2021, TSMC will present in the advanced packaging tutorial. This tutorial will discuss advanced packaging technologies that enable performance and density improvements. Descriptions of the technologies and how they are used in cutting edge applications will be provided, by the industry leader in packaging and chip design.
We look forward to these exciting talks, live access to the speakers, and to what promises to be lively engagement subsequently during the HotChips 2021 virtual conference! If you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time - early bird pricing ends Aug 6! Click this link to sign up, and see you soon at this year’s exciting symposium!