CES 2011 Micros

Jan. 21, 2011
CES 2011 was host to a number of new processor announcements including the latest from Intel, AMD and VIA Technologies.

Intel Sandy Bridge

AMD eBrazos APU

Bug Labs Bug 2.0

Who says CES is just about consumer products? Well, most people do but there were a lot of semiconductor and system vendors at the show as well hawking their wares. We got quite a few of them to show off their technology for our cameras. You can see the results at Engineering TV's CES 2011 video coverage for Electronic Design. Also check out our CES 2011 Trade Show coverage page for more articles.

Our video editors are still scrambling to get all the videos up but I have indexed a sizable chunk here and split them into sections. Check out the Engineering TV's CES 2011 playlist for the latest.

Microprocessors

Intel's Sandy Bridge (Fig. 1) was everywhere. Most systems on display were consumer oriented but it was Intel's embedded news that sparked a lot of interest with developers (see An Embedded Sandy Bridge). AMD's Fusion and eBrazo's (Fig. 2)Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) platforms (see APU Targets Embedded Applications) were on display as well. In addition, VIA Technologies was showing off their multicore VIA Nano X2. AMD and NVidia had graphics boards on display and NVidia was also showing off systems that took advantage of the Tegra 2. Freescale had mobile examples using their i.MX line of processors. Sigma Design's was showing off their multimedia SoC. Likewise, NuFront's 2 GHz NuSmart 2816 dual core Arm processor (see 2GHz Dual Core Cortex-A9 Targets Tablets) was inside some mobile reference designs.

Finally, Bug Labs was showing off their Bug 2.0 (see Build With A Bug) development kit based on Texas Instrument's OMAP processor. The modular system Bug 2.0 system (Fig. 3) includes wireless connectivity and adds a graphics interface for display modules.

Storage

Specialized processors are showing up in SoC's (system-on-chip) designs for gateways and NAS (network attached storage). We took a look at a number of new digital platforms at CES and Storage Visions.

Marvell's HyperDou SATA controller (see SATA Controller Pins Files On SSDs) blends solid state disk (SSD) storage with a hard disk drive (HDD). Marvell also had their Armada processors (see ARM Microcontroller For The Cloud Delivers Quad Cores And Quad Peripherals ) on display.

PLX Technology and Applied Micro were showing of platforms targeted as NAS boxes and gateways. This included Applied Micros' Mamba (see Multicore Server Processor Slims Down Secure Networking).

Power and Sensors

Intelligent systems are also hiding processors. We saw a number of solutions that looked very interesting in addition to being very programmable.

That is it for now. We saw more at the show and most of what we saw will be in the videos. There were quite a few microcontroller and microprocessors that we didn't get to or can't talk about yet but they will be showing up on Electronic Design later in the year so stay tuned.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.  

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence. 

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