Intel – Page 2 – Observations from Uppsala

DVCon Europe 2020 – Developing Hardware like Software?

The Design and Verification Conference Europe (DVCon Europe) took place back in late October 2020. In a normal year, we would add “in München, Germany” to the end of that sentence. But that is not how things were done in 2020. Instead, it was a virtual conference with world-wide attendance. Here are my notes on what I found the most interesting from the conference (for various reasons, this text did come out with a bit of delay).

Intel Blog Post: Shift-Left for a Snowy Ridge

There is a new blog post on the Intel Developer Zone on how we used Simics virtual platforms for the new Intel® Atom® P5900 series of system-on-chip (previously known as Snow Ridge). It talks about how shift-left works both inside of Intel and with our customers for the new chip, and the kinds of virtual platform models you use for different types of use cases.

See https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2020/03/17/seeing-the-early-snow-on-the-ridge

DAC 2019 – Cloud, a Book, an Award, and More

Last week was spent at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Las Vegas. I had a presentation and poster in the Designer/IP track about Clouds, Containers, and Virtual Platforms , and worked in the Intel Simulation Solutions booth at the show floor. The DAC was good as always, meeting many old friends in the industry as well as checking out the latest trends in EDA (hint: same trends as everywhere else). One particularly nice surprise was a book (the printed type, not the Vegas “book” that means something else entirely).

Embedded World 2019

The Embedded World in Nürnberg is still going strong as the best tradeshow for “Embedded” in the world. This year, I spent time doing booth duty and gave a talk in the Conference part of the event. There was an unusual high number of old friends and business acquaintances around, and it was a great experience overall with many fruitful discussions and connections for the future. However, it seems that there is always something that goes slightly awry with my travel to the show…

Talking about Temporal Decoupling at DVCon Europe

This year’s Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon Europe) takes place on October 24 and 25 (2018). DVCon Europe has turned into the best conference for virtual platform topics, and this year is no exception. There are some good talks coming!

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Intel Blog Post: Looking at the Instruction Mix of Windows 10

In a previous Intel blog post “Question: Does Software Actually Use New Instruction Sets?” I looked at the kinds of instructions used by few different Linux setups, and how each setup was affected by changing the type of the processor it was running on (comparing Nehalem to Skylake). As a follow-up to that post, I have now done the same for Microsoft* Windows* 10. In the blog post, I take a look at how Windows 10 behaves across processor generations, and how its behavior compares to Ubuntu* 16 (they are actually pretty similar in philosophy).

Intel Blog: Question: Does Software Actually Use New Instruction Sets?

Over time, Intel and other processor core designers add more and more instructions to the cores in our machines. A good question is how quickly and easily new instructions added to an Instruction-Set Architecture (ISA) actually gets employed by software to improve performance and add new capabilities. Considering that our operating systems and programs are generally backwards-compatible, and run on all kind of hardware, can they actually take advantage of new instructions?

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”Figure out What to Do”, Says the Manual

I just spend some hours building a new living room PC for the home. I based on common components like a Fractal Design Node 202 chassis and an MSI Z270i motherboard for my Intel Core i7-7700 processor. Trying to figure out how to put it together was a bit interesting though – especially if I had tried to do so without the help of the Internet. The manuals that came with some of the components were just completely useless, essentially boiling down to “please figure out what to do”.

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Clocks or Cores? Choose One

Once upon a time, when multicore processors were novelties, multicore was motivated by the simple fact that it was impossible to keep raising the clock frequency of processors. More “clocks” simply would result in an overheated mess. Instead, by adding more cores, much more performance could be obtained without having to go to extreme frequencies and power budgets. The first multicore processors pretty much kept clock frequencies of the single-core processors preceding them, and that has remained the mainstream fact until today. Desktop and laptop processors tend to stay at 4 cores or less. But when you go beyond 4 cores, clock frequencies tend to start to go down in order to keep power consumption per package under control. A nice example of this can be found in Intel’s Xeon lineup.
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First post on the Intel Software and Services Blog

intel sw small I have posted my first blog post to the Intel Software and Services blog channel. The Intel Software and Services blog is one channel in the Intel corporate blog you find at https://blogs.intel.com/. Other bloggers on the Software and Services channel write about security, UEFI, cloud, graphics, open source software, and other topics. Intel has a large software development community, and we produce quite a bit of software – and we do write about the innovations that come out of Intel that rely on software.

On my part, I will be posting more materials on simulation at Intel, as part of my role as a simulation evangelist on the Software and Service blog channel.

Wind River Guest Blog: Interview with Sangeeta, a CoFluent user doing Software Modeling

Cofluent studio Even though I am now working for Intel, the nice folks at Wind River have let me do blogging on the Wind River blog as a guest anyway. I first blogged about the fantastic world of simulators that I have found inside Intel, and now a longer technical piece has appeared on a use of Intel CoFluent Studio. I interviewed Sangeeta Ghangam at Intel, who used CoFluent Studio to model the behavior of a complex software load on a gateway, connected to a set of sensor nodes. It is rather different from the very concrete software execution I work on with Simics. Being able to model and estimate the performance and cost and size of systems before you go to the concrete implementation is an important part of software and systems architecture, and CoFluent offers a neat tool for that.

Read the full story on the Wind River blog!

Intel Technology Journal on Simics

Simics_ITJ_180-wide The September 2013 issue of the Intel Technology Journal (which actually arrived in December) is all about Simics. Daniel Aarno of Intel and I served as the content architects for the issue, which meant that we managed to contributed articles from various sources, and wrote an introductory article about Simics and its usage in general. It has taken a while to get this journal issue out, and now that it is done it feels just great! I am very happy about the quality of all the ten contributed articles, and reading the final versions of them actually taught me some new things you could do with Simics! I already wrote about the issue in a Wind River blog post, so in this my personal blog I want to be a little bit more, well, personal.

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Does ISA Matter for Performance?

When I grew up with computers, the big RISC vs CISC debate was raging. At the time, in the late 1980s, it did indeed seem that RISC was inherently superior to CISC. SPARCs, MIPS, and Alpha all outpaced boring old x86, VAX and 68000 processors. This turned out to be a historical parenthesis, as the Pentium Pro from Intel showed how RISC-style performance could be mated to a CISC ISA. However, maybe ISAs still do matter.

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Wind River Blog: Crystal Forest on Simics

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about Simics running a model of the new Intel Crystal Forest platform. Crystal Forest is a very complex piece of hardware, but I am pretty happy that we managed to demo it in an understandable way – by essentially using it as a black box and putting a pretty display on top of that (using Eclipse).

S4D 2010

Looks like S4D (and the co-located FDL) is becoming my most regular conference. S4D is a very interactive event. With some 20 to 30 people in the room, many of them also presenting papers at the conference, it turns into a workshop at its best. There were plenty of discussion going on during sessions and the breaks, and I think we all got new insights and ideas.

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