Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls Palladium the one equipment extra vital to him than the fridge. At Cadence Design Methods annual occasion in Santa Clara, California, he additionally acknowledged that Nvidia has the most important set up of Palladium emulation programs.
Earlier, throughout a fireplace chat, Huang mentioned that Blackwell AI processor wouldn’t exist with out Palladium. So, what’s Palladium and why is it making waves for big and highly effective chip designs? It’s an emulation device constructed round Cadence’s customized processors, and it’s used for pre-silicon {hardware} debugging.
Determine 1 Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 ship quick pre-silicon verification and validation of the big, complicated chip designs. Supply: Cadence
At CadenceLive, held on 17 April 2024, the EDA toolmaker unveiled Palladium Z3 alongside Protium X3. “The supercharged Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 are constructed to ship quick pre-silicon verification and validation of the most important and most complicated units,” mentioned Dhiraj Goswami, company VP of {hardware} system verification R&D at Cadence.
Palladium Z3, which gives roughly 1.5 instances the efficiency of its predecessor Palladium Z2, can scale from 16 million gates to all the way in which 48 billion gates. It additionally options specialised apps for duties reminiscent of 4-state emulation, mixed-signal emulation, security emulation, and fine-grained energy evaluation.
Subsequent, the Protium X3 system, constructed round AMD Epyc processors paired to AMD Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive system-on-chips (SoCs), offers bodily prototyping to speed up bring-up instances for pre-silicon software program validation of complicated, multi-billion gate chip designs. It’s additionally 1.5 instances sooner than its predecessor, Protium X2.
Palladium and Protium create a digital model of a chip to start out writing software program whereas ready for the bodily chip to return from the fab. That’s how chip design emulation accelerates time to market. Nonetheless, although Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 work in tandem, as defined above, they facilitate several types of workloads.
Determine 2 Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 function a unified compiler and customary digital and bodily interfaces. Supply: Cadence
Nvidia, which used Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 predecessors in designing just-announced Blackwell AI processors, is already testing these upgraded programs in a few of its AI processor designs. “The subsequent-generation Palladium and Protium programs push the boundaries of capability and efficiency to assist allow a brand new period of generative AI computing,” mentioned Scot Schultz, senior director for networking at Nvidia.
Immediately’s giant chip designs serving purposes like AI and high-performance computing (HPC) more and more demand emulation options that provide increased efficiency together with sooner and extra predictable compile debug. New emulation programs reminiscent of Palladium fill the necessity with early software program growth, hardware-software verification, and debug duties.
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