Integrated-circuit scaling has enabled semiconductors to become an indispensable part of industry. Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling have developed into design- and system-technology co-optimization to overcome the challenges posed by data centers, AI, and consumer demand.

Renesas’s RA8 family of MCUs is the first on the market with Arm’s latest Cortex M85 CPU. Performance beats existing MCUs built on the Cortex M7.

MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 shakes up the CPU configuration previously typical of smartphone processors and nearly doubles the AI performance of its predecessor.

After discontinuing work on its first design, RISC V startup Ventana is readying its Veyron V2. The company plans to offer it as a 32-CPU chiplet and as a licensable core.

Cadence has updated its DSPs to use the latest platform while making further improvements to two audio and two vision models.

Axelera’s Metis AI accelerator achieves over 200 TOPS using digital in-memory computing for high-end edge applications. Typical power is less than 10 W; module pricing is below that of incumbents.

Silicon Valley startup D-Matrix is trying to accelerate LLMs with its digital in-memory compute (DIMC) chip. The company’s Corsair card provides up to 9,600 TOPS at 600 W.

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite for laptops finally achieves competitive Arm-architecture performance while keeping power low. It’s the company’s first use of its Nuvia-originated CPU.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 uses more, faster CPUs and fewer power-efficient CPUs to boost performance. The company’s glitzy AI demos highlight’s what’s now possible on a phone.

AI-chip startups raised billions of dollars in prior years, but this year investors turned their attention to RISC-V startups. The new instruction set faces both technical and business challenges.

Automotive safety assessment isn’t as simple as declaring an ASIL level. Some ASIL D certifications cover more than others. The details matter.

SiFive’s P870 CPU is a high-throughput RISC-V core, implementing a wide microarchitecture and promising performance exceeding that of Arm’s fastest Cortex-A CPU.