Google’s AI scientist Samy Bengio has reportedly resigned over a controversy with the company. Brother of Yoshua Bengio, another world-famous AI scientist, Samy joined Google in 2007 and was part of the TensorFlow team. Prior to that, Samy Bengio co-developed Torch, the ancestor of PyTorch. It will be interesting to see where he will be landing next. Let’s now move to some updates, catching up on some of the news from the last couple of weeks.
Cadence Palladium Z2 and Protium X2 systems
Cadence has introduced the Palladium Z2 Enterprise Emulation and Protium X2 Enterprise Prototyping systems, representing the new generation of the current Palladium Z1 and Protium X1. Based on new emulation processors and Xilinx UltraScale+ VU19P FPGAs, these systems provide – according to Cadence – 2X capacity and 1.5X performance improvements over their predecessors. Both platforms offer a modular compile technology capable of compiling 10 billion gates in under ten hours on the Palladium Z2 system and in under twenty-four hours on the Protium X2 system.
Cadence Palladium Z2 and Protium X2. Credit: Business Wire
Siemens’ new Veloce system
Siemens has unveiled its new Veloce hardware-assisted verification system, that combines virtual platform, hardware emulation, and FPGA prototyping technologies. The solution includes four new products: Veloce HYCON (HYbrid CONfigurable) for virtual platform/software-enabled verification; Veloce Strato+, a capacity upgrade to the Veloce Strato hardware emulator that scales up to 15 billion gates; Veloce Primo for enterprise-level FPGA prototyping; and Veloce proFPGA for desktop FPGA prototyping. Customer-built virtual SoC models can begin running real-world firmware and software on Veloce Strato+ for deep-visibility to the lowest level of hardware, then the same design can be moved to Veloce Primo to validate the software/hardware interfaces and execute application-level software while running closer to actual system speeds. Both Veloce Strato+ and Veloce Primo use the same RTL, the same virtual verification environment, the same transactors and models. A key technology in the upgraded Veloce platform is a new, proprietary 2.5D chip which – according to Siemens – enables a 1.5x system capacity increase over the previous Strato system.
