Inside NVIDIA's Massive Hardware Emulation Lab 51
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA recently decided to give the public a look at their massive investment in hardware emulation technologies. Hardware emulators are specialized systems that can be programmed to emulate any specific architecture. In NVIDIA's case, a standard x86 system is connected to a powerful hardware emulator that's been pre-programmed to emulate a GeForce GPU that's still under design. The testbed generates the code in question and sends it over to the emulator, which then executes and returns the output. The emulators are massive machines that can be connected together and scaled for capacity and performance. NVIDIA's Indus emulator can emulate up to two billion gates and in their entire facility, the company can emulate up to 4 billion total."
BFD. (Score:0, Insightful)
Wow, NVIDIA paid Cadence millions for a more or less off the shelf logic accelerator. Just like every other company that's designing a large ASIC.
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, this kind of debugging has been in use since the late 1980's. The only things that have changed are the vendors who build the emulators and the size of the hardware that can be emulated. Why is this amazing?
I concept isn't amazing. The scale of execution is. It's like saying that the Grand Canyon isn't amazing since your street is riddled with potholes.