Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
In August, a strange security vulnerability dubbed “Ghostwrite” was making the rounds in the press. Basically, a vector store instruction on an Alibaba T-Head C910 RISC-V-based processor would just write to a physical address without doing a virtual-to-physical translation or checking any kind of access rights. That is just totally weird. Just how could that be implemented and slip through testing???
Continue reading “Ghostwrite – Now This is Weird”
The 2023 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on November 14 and 15, in the traditional location of the Holiday Inn Munich City Center. This was the 10th time the conference took place, serving as an excuse for a great anniversary dinner. Also new was the addition of a research track to provide academics publishing at the conference with the academic credit their work deserves. This year had a large number of papers related to virtual platforms, so writing this report has taken me longer than usual. There was just so much to cover.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2023 – 10th Anniversary Edition”The 2022 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference was back in physical form at its usual venue at the Holiday Inn München. It was a great conference, and just like at the 2022 DAC people were very happy to be back in person.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2022. Verification, System Simulation, and People!”
Just like in 2020, the Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) Europe 2021 was a virtual conference. It took place from October 26 to 27, with the SystemC Evolution day on October 28 (as usual). As has been the case in recent years, the verification side of the conference is significantly larger than the design side. This is common with the other DVCon conferences in the world. In this blog, I will go through my main observations from DVCon Europe, and share some notes from some of the presentations.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2021 – Testbenches, AI, and Open Source”
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).
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2020 – Developing Hardware like Software?”This blog post was originally published at Intel. After it was retired from the Intel blog system, I reposted the full contents here in order to preserve the information for my own sake. And in case anyone has a pointer here.
In the early 1990s, “PC graphics” was almost an oxymoron. If you wanted to do real graphics, you bought a “real machine”, most likely a Silicon Graphics workstation. At the PC price-point, fast hardware-accelerated 3D graphics wasn’t doable… until it suddenly was, thanks to Moore’s law. 3dfx was the first company to create fast 3D graphics for PC gamers. To get off the ground and get funded, 3dfx had to prove that their ideas were workable – and that proof came in the shape of a simulator. They used the simulator to demo their ideas, try out different design points, develop software pre-silicon, and validate the silicon once it arrived.