PCB007 Magazine

PCB-July2016

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92 The PCB Magazine • July 2016 graphic, advertisement or social media posting. Ensuring that literature is composed in a tone that conveys your organization's vision with the text and images that "speak the voice" of the targeted readership is essential. Literature, when constructed correctly, consistently com- municates the meaning and relevance of the company's brand. Given the time and thought you devote to generating documentation to support your company's product or service, literature takes no back seat to the fancy-schmancy digital world. It may not have the dynamics of digital, however, the "deep-dive" contents contained in brochures, case studies and selection guides (to name a few) continue to be highly coveted by customers and prospects. Literature is equally used as strategic follow-up by sales and market- ing teams to reinforce site visits and showcase technical and applications expertise. And— news alert—that collateral (ouch!) is often re- purposed for other editorial and promotional purposes. So, go ahead—give your literature some lovin' and the respect that it deserves. It may be deemed old-school by some, but it can and should become a powerful part of an integrated program or a singular objective. PCB References 1. Merriam-webster.com Barry Cohen is president and managing director of Launch Communications. He can be reached by clicking here. GIVE YOUR LITERATURE SOME LOVIN' A microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer En- gineering. The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and con- tains 621 million transistors. The KiloCore was presented at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Tech- nology and Circuits in Honolulu on June 16. "To the best of our knowledge, it is the world's first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university," said Bevan Baas, professor of electri- cal and computer engineering, who led the team that designed the chip architecture. While other multiple-processor chips have been created, none exceed about 300 processors. Most were created for research purposes and few are sold commer- cially. The KiloCore chip was fab- ricated by IBM using their 32 nm CMOS technology. Each processor core can run its own small program independent- ly of the others, which is a funda- mentally more flexible approach than so-called Single-Instruction- Multiple-Data approaches uti- lized by processors such as GPUs; the idea is to break an applica- tion up into many small pieces, each of which can run in parallel on different processors, enabling high throughput with lower en- ergy use, Baas said. Applications already developed for the chip in- clude wireless coding/decoding, video processing, encryption, and others involving large amounts of parallel data such as scientific data applications and datacenter record processing. The team has completed a compiler and auto- matic program mapping tools for use in program- ming the chip. World's First 1,000-processor Chip

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