Spansion is a name that's probably familiar to many of you, as a supplier of nonvolatile memories. You might be wondering, therefore, what the company's doing gracing the pages of InsideDSP. Well, hold that thought! Spansion was originally founded in 1993 as a joint venture of AMD and Fujitsu, and named FASL (Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor Limited). AMD took over full control of FASL in 2003, renamed it Spansion LLC in 2004 and spun it out as a standalone corporate entity at the end of 2005.

Remember that childhood game where you try to decide which famous person—or which book, or whatever—you’d like to have with you, if you were to be stranded on a desert island?

Last month's edition of InsideDSP discussed MIPS' recent three-core Aptiv product family announcement and provided detailed information on the high-end proAptiv offering. This follow-up article will cover the mid-range interAptiv and entry-level microAptiv cores. As with proAptiv, ARM is clearly in MIPS' gunsights with both of these new architectures.

interAptiv

When people talk about processor benchmarks, the conversation usually ends up being all about speed. Other metrics, such as energy efficiency, are often given less attention or are completely overlooked. The unspoken assumption driving these conversations is that a faster processor is better.

A decade ago, ARM processors were mainly found in cell phones, disk drives, and few other specialized applications. These days, they seem to be everywhere, from microcontrollers to tablet PCs. During this same time period, digital signal processing (DSP) tasks such as multimedia and communications functions have also become increasingly common in a wide range of systems. Given these two trends, it's no surprise that there's been a big uptick in products using ARM processors to implement digital signal processing tasks.

Note: the earlier-published (and reversed) 'tick' and 'tock' descriptions have been corrected.

Processor core provider MIPS Technologies has seemingly fallen on hard times in recent years. Consider, for example, a report published by the Linley Group just last week that indicated chief competitor ARM supplied CPU cores used in 78% of the estimated 10 billion CPU cores in SoCs shipped last year. ARM's estimated per-core license price was 4.6 cents, versus 7 cents for MIPS. However, with MIPS licensees shipping only 665 million MIPS cores (6% of the market, in third place, behind Synopsys/ARC at 10%), MIPS’ revenues trail far behind ARM’s.

The phrase "the long tail" has come into prominence in the past few years to convey the concept that in some markets, a large number of niche products, each sold in low volume, can create a larger aggregate opportunity than that represented by a small number of blockbuster high-volume products. In the retail world, the long tail has become larger - and consequently has grown as a business opportunity - as the costs of maintaining inventory and delivering products has fallen.