Shalom. Today is CDNLive Israel in Tel Aviv. At least getting here from San Francisco has got easier, since United now has direct flights three days a week. But for locals, it is not so easy: Commuters traveling to Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial hub, are expected to face vast traffic logjams over the next eight days as Israel Railways carries out major repair and upgrade work on the tracks leading into the city. Today was the first of those days. One guy I know told me that he and his wife came from Jerusalem. It took one hour to reach the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Then almost two hours to get to the hotel, less than 10 kilometers. Keynotes Adar Segal, the sales director for Israel, welcomed everyone. He gave a few numbers. There were just over 900 people registered for CDNLive, from 190 companies. That's an impressively large number of companies, an indicator of the health of the semiconductor startup ecosystem here. Cadence has 300 people here. The first keynote was by Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence's CEO. He gave his version of the System Design Enablement presentation that every CDNLive has kicked off with this year. I wrote about a version of this presentation in CDNLive India Keynote . One piece of local color was that both the verification products acquired with Verisity several years ago, and the recent Rocketsim acquired with Rocketick are largely developed by teams in Israel. Lip-Bu pointed out that we have doubled the number of R&D engineers in Israel over the last five years. The second keynote was by David (Dadi) Perlmutter. He is a legend in the semiconductor industry, especially in Israel, since for many years he was Intel's Chief Product Officer (CPO) and GM of the Intel Architecture Group. But in 2014, he left Intel to co-found Eucalyptus Growth Capital. He talked about where computing has been and what he sees as the future. One thing is that technology often goes in cycles. Building computers used to be vertically integrated back in the mainframe era, where a single company would do everything from the hardware up to the operating system, completely vertically integrated. Then in the PC era, it was horizontal, with different companies supplying silicon, the hardware, the operating system. Now, with smartphones, at least at the high end, there is a lot more vertical integration, with the top three suppliers (Samsung, Apple, and Huawei) all designing their own chips, and, in the case of Apple, their own operating system, too. Even in the cloud, people are moving to do their own silicon. One big question in the cloud is whether Intel will continue to dominate, or whether Power or ARM (or something else) will get a significant share. In the cloud, for many companies, it is Amazon, Facebook, and Alibaba who know what they need and they want to optimize their own silicon without giving all their knowledge to the semiconductor vendors. One high-profile example is Google's Tensor chip. Power is the big driver, not just in mobile. Dadi said that only one-third of a datacenter is taken up with the actual servers, the other two-thirds is getting power in and heat out. The world is changing fast in front of our eyes. Storage is going from magnetic disk to non-volatile memory. Interconnect in datacenters is going from copper and electrons to fiber and photons. Silicon photonics will revolutionize datacenters but there is a need to extend the fabless model from pure silicon to encompass silicon photonics too. Client communication has gone from wired and is now almost entirely wireless. But it is not just the cloud, there is extensive computing power in the edge devices. Just look at Apple's Ax series of chips. There has been a huge change over the last two or three decades. In the mainframe era, almost nobody ever saw a real computer except in movies. Now we all have one (or more) in our pockets and it is permanently connected to the rest of the world. However, the form factor is almost entirely defined by I/O. Phones got really small when all that we needed was to dial a call. Then they got larger again as we wanted more functionality. The screen needs to be large enough but not too large. That could all be going to change with new VR/AR technologies that could separate I/O from compute. He didn't have time to show this video, but gave us the link. This shows the HoloLens (which, by the way, contains a large number of Tensilica processors) working in a virtual office. (Please visit the site to view this video) Neural networks are making a huge change in visual computing since classic Von Neumann machines are not the best solution. We expect machines to learn and understand gestures. This is driving the need for more parellelism. Traditional CPUs take too much power, as do GPUs. DSPs are too hard to program and hardwired designs are unable to adapt fast enough to changing algorithms. The big opportunity in IoT is IIoT, the industrial internet of things. Dadi had a GE slide pointing out that a 1% improvement in the efficiency of the rail industry is worth $1.6B. The rules of the game for optimizing software are changing completely. It used to be that we could optimize software just by waiting for the next process node, but that doesn't work any more. New approaches are required, especially getting more parallelism. Dadi's summary: General-purpose (Von Neumann) computing is not enough for future needs The intelligence of the cloud will extend beyond the compute subsystem Will the I/O revolution redefine mobile computing? IoT needs an architecture leader Integrating IoT devices into a single chip is a challenge Silicon processing technology is getting more complex and expensive With his background of many years at Intel, it was interesting that Dadi's parting remark was "I would not bet on 5nm." Rest of the Day After the keynotes, each of the various tracks received a technology update. I have covered these before too, at Verification Technology Update and CDNLive Bengaluru: Day 2 . I attended a few sessions later in the day, but since most of the presentations were a hybrid with the slides in English but the presentation in Hebrew, I didn't get the full color. Previous: MIPI: Not Just Mobile Any More![]()
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