Xilinx takes Zynq to 11—or more precisely to 1GHz

In the satirical 1984 movie “This is Spinal Tap,” Nigel the guitarist explains why the volume controls on his Marshall amps go to 11 instead of 10 like everyone else’s amps: “If we need that extra push over the cliff,” we put it up to 11. Xilinx just did that with the clock rate of its Zynq-7000 family of processors with integrated FPGA fabrics. The two ARM Cortex-A9 processor cores in the 28nm Zynq-7000 parts were originally specified at 800MHz. Now, they go to 1GHz.

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