Month: September 2025

“Pre-Silicon and Post-Silicon Virtual Platforms” – Computer and System Architecture Unraveled Event Six

After a rather long break, we finally had another Computer and System Architecture Unraveled meetup. This time, we had two speakers talking about virtual platforms. Fredrik Larsson from the Simics team at Intel addressed pre-silicon use cases, and Jakob Engblom from the VLAB Works team at Cadence (i.e., myself) talked about uses in Automotive and embedded (mostly post-silicon).

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It Must be the Antivirus

I recently got access to a sparkling new demo machine for VLAB. Based on an AMD 9950X3D processor coupled with fast RAM and a blazing SSD. This is a perfect machine for running virtual platforms, with arguably the best microarchitecture available and a huge L3 cache (which is known to benefit code like simulations). Installed in a box that allows sustained 5GHz+ clocks. Nice. But when I started to run VLAB, things did not seem right. It took a long time to start a new simulation and some things just seemed “off”. What could be wrong?

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