An Apples to Oranges Comparision of a Gigabit Ethernet PHY to a General-Purpose CPU

Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition i980EE Broadcom BCM54980 Type 6 core CPU 8 port Gigabit PHY Geometry 32nm 90nm Operations Per Second 127 Billion instructions per second 4,800 Billion operations per second Power 130W 4.0W Operations Per Watt 976 Million Ops/W 1.2 Trillion Ops/W Of course, this is an unfair comparison, but it shows you: [...]

John Sculley Interview

I read John Sculley’s interview with Leander Kahney. John Sculley was the CEO of Apple Computer from the mid 80s until the mid 90s. I appreciate Sculley’s candor and analysis, but I feel that while Sculley got the big picture of pervasive technology (The Newton), he didn’t and still doesn’t get the details. Sculley said [...]

BMW Announces Ethernet Plans

This EE Times article lays out BMW’s plans for Ethernet in the car.

Anandtech was right

This report from EEtimes shows that Ganesh called it correctly a month and a half ago. The Apple A4 has the Samsung/Intrinsity Hummingbird core with other IP tacked on. An EETimes article from last year claims Marvell spent $100million on its Sheeva ARM processor and QUALCOMM spent $300 million on Snapdragon. If Apple is able [...]

Timeline of standalone gigabit copper PHYs

The following shows a timeline for gigabit PHYs from 1999 until today. Missing are Realtek and Attansic. GigPHY_timeline I updated the doc to show the trends on a per-port basis for cost and power. While the PHYs have different MAC interfaces, and some press releases quoted in 10K and others in 1K quantity, you can [...]