Only half an hour ago, the embargoes lifted. Freescale announced its new QorIQ series of multicore (and some single- and dual-core) processors. For the top-end of that line, the P4080, Freescale and Virtutech (where I work, remember) have developed a virtual platform solution to help Freescale customers get to working products faster. The virtual platform is available now, and is already running several operating systems including VxWorks, QNX, and a variety of Linuxes. Apart from the fairly large scale of this SoC, the really new part of the virtual platform is the so-called Hybrid solution, where the fast models are combined with detailed models from Freescale themselves. This creates a cycle-level detailed model with validated timing, “from the source” — but without the performance issues of having to run everything at great level of detail. Rather, you use the fast model to steer the simulation of a workload to an interesting spot, and then turn up the level of detail then and there. You can also select which components of the chip are actually detailed and which parts are modeled with the fast functional models, avoiding the incredible slow-down of running and entire virtual platform at a great level of detail.
If you happen to be at the FTF in Orlando, do come by and look at the demos!
I have been involved in this work for the past year, and it is wonderful to finally see it coming out and be able to talk about it.
Here is a comment on the QorIQ virtualization solution from Brad Dixon of Montavista, on their corporate blog. http://mvista.com/blogs/dixon/2008/06/17/linux-at-the-freescale-technology-forum/ Could not have said it better myself, he especially appreciates the full-speed version of Simics rather than the more detailed simulators he has used previously.