CDNLive EMEA is nominally held in Munich (München in German) but, in fact, is held in a small town outside called Unterschleißheim at the Dolce Hotel. If you follow the directions we give, then you take the S-bahn (train) and then a bus. It suggests a taxi is a more practical alternative but there were no taxis on a Sunday afternoon so I took the bus with the correct number. But unfortunately I went in the wrong direction and ended up at the other train station in town. At least it didn't cost me anything since I had no idea how payment works on the bus and the driver spoke no English, so he waved me on. A bar full of German families enjoying their Sunday afternoon called me a taxi and I managed to get to the right place. I knew it was the right place since the flagpoles had a Cadence flag and a CDNLive flag. CDNLive EMEA had two keynotes on the second morning by Tom Beckley of Cadence and Ulf Ewaldsson, the CTO of Ericsson. I already posted about them: Tom and Ulf . There were eight tracks on Monday, but by Tuesday, an additional two tracks had been added to make a total of ten. For many years there has been an academic track at CDNLive in Europe (we had one for the first time this year in CDNLive Silicon Valley), and in fact the first session I attended was on the academic track describing design technology co-optimization work being done between Cadence and imec . I attended many other interesting sessions and I will post about them over the next couple of weeks. Europe is very strong in automotive (for example, the B in BMW stands for Bayerische—Bavarian—and is headquartered in Munich), so that was especially interesting. One of the sessions I attended was on functional safety and is already published . There was also an exhibition, which doubled up as the place where refreshments, lunches, and dinner on the first evening were served. Plus, as in CDNLive Silicon Valley, there was a CDNLive app that allowed you to examine the schedule, organize your day, and post photographs and comments. The biggest thing that seemed to go wrong was that the clickers to advance the slides would not work for the keynotes. It turned out that the lights that were only put up during the night use WiFi, too, and somehow everything was interfering with each other. Everyone missed an opportunity for a free Palladium Z1 when the shipper failed to pick it up and it sat outside in front of the hotel unattended. Actually, any potential thief would have been very disappointed to find out that the circuit boards are not populated and it really was just the demo version. Bayern München, the local football team, really were at the same hotel as CDNLive. The hotel is not far from where they play and on home game days they take over the top floor of the hotel. (Apparently before they started sequestering the team like that, they would have players going out drinking before the game and generally not preparing.) In a nice coincidence, the colors of CDNLive are the same blue and white of the Bavarian flag, although for some reason Bayern München play in red, not blue and white. It is the UEFA Champions League (for Americans, think of it as the playoffs) and Bayern München made it to the semi-finals. Cadence even has a clause in its contract with the conference hotel that if they get far enough in the series, then CDNLive has to give up a couple of its conference rooms where we would otherwise have sessions, and give up the public space on the top floor that we intended to use for the press briefing. But, hey, we get a discount, too. CDNLive EMEA actually takes place over two days, like CDNLive Silicon Valley, but from Monday lunchtime to Wednesday lunchtime. The big dinner is on Tuesday evening. What all the locals wanted to know was whether the game would be on at the dinner. München were playing Atlético Madrid. Each "game" actually consists of two games, one held at each team's ground. But the rules are not like an American playoff, the best of some odd number of games. Instead, the scores from the two games are added together, with one wrinkle that goals scored away from home count double. München had lost to Madrid 1-0 so they would have to win by a margin of twice as many goals as Madrid scored (my brain hurts, but I think that means 1-0, 3-1, 5-2) . In the event, with a large percentage of CDNLive watching, they won. But only 2-1 and so they were out. That means that it is an all-Madrid final between Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid. It was definitely fun to see the whole team pass by a couple of feet away when they arrived and left, and then see them on TV a couple of hours later. In other football news, Leicester (pronounced Lester) City won the English Premier League, which they have never done before. They are normally fighting against demotion back down to division 1. This was an event so unlikely at the start of the season that you could bet on it happening with 5,000:1 odds (£100,000 on a standard £20 bet). To put that in perspective, you can only get 3000:1 odds on U2's Bono being the next pope. This actually happened on the Monday of CDNLive, with great attention being paid by all the British attendees. Leicester were not even playing, but Spurs (Tottenham Hotspur), the only team that could beat them, had to win all their remaining games. They were 2-0 ahead over Chelsea at half-time but Chelsea came back and with the final score 2-2, Leicester suddenly found themselves as the unlikely Champions, a feat only achieved by five teams previously. Somebody, somewhere, was sitting with Wikipedia updated, ready to hit "enter" on the final whistle of the Spurs-Chelsea game: While 48 clubs have competed since the inception of the Premier League in 1992, only six have won the title: Manchester United (13), Chelsea (4), Arsenal (3), Manchester City (2), Blackburn Rovers (1), and Leicester City (1). Of course that means they will play in the 2017 UEFA Champions League and maybe they'll be taking over half the CDNLive EMEA hotel. They even play in CDNLive blue. Previous: CDNLive: Design Technology Co-Optimization for N7 and N5![]()
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