This week it was the last CDNLive of the year, CDNLive Israel in Tel Aviv. From my point of view the show ran perfectly. But I'm always reminded of that description of a swan as "serene on top and furiously paddling underneath." I realize how much work it takes to make these things look "serene", and lots of kudos to the events team. Adar Segal Adar Segal, Cadence's country manager in Israel, was the MC for the morning. He said...well, I don't know much of what he said since mostly he spoke in Hebrew. He did say that Cadence Israel just passed 300 employees. There is a strong R&D team in Israel, not just sales and support (although there is that too, of course). When Cadence acquired both Jasper Design Automation and Rocketick, they both had a lot of their engineering in Israel, and we have continued to grow those teams in Haifa and Petah Tikva. Anirudh Devgan Anirudh, Cadence's President, gave the opening keynote.I won't cover that again here, it is (roughly) the same keynote that has opened all the other CDNLive events this year, albeit with different presenters. Anirudh kept on the headcount theme and said that Cadence now has 7,300 people worldwide. A lot of them are in engineering, making up 37-38% of revenue, the highest in the industry. Our operating margin of 29-30% is also high (the highest?). If you have to pick one trend for 2018, it has to be machine learning. One big cloud company told Anirudh that 40% of their workload is machine learning, and they spend as much on GPUs as Intel CPUs. There has been a huge shift in workloads. We announced Cadence Cloud at DAC and already have 20 customers on it, after years of providing Hosted Design Solutions on our own servers. 16 of the top 20 customers are using Cadence Digital flow—a few years ago it was just a handful. As Anirudh said: We work closely with partners like TSMC and Arm so that we can work more closely with you. We have ported some key tools to Arm-based servers (Anirudh was previewing what we announced on the first day of Arm TechCon). See my post Of Arms and the Man I Sing for more details). One customer told Anirudh that 60% of (internal) farm usage was logic simulation, and another 20% characterization. So 80% simulation. A big customer in Asia deployed Excelium to thousands and thousands of Arm servers. In Machine Learning Anirudh hinted at some good results we have been getting. Innovus with ML on a 10nm CPU got 12% improvement in total negative slack (TNS). On a 7nm CPU there was an improvement of 3.84% in area and a reduction of 3% in power. Hrvoye Bilic "Bili" If you recognize football jerseys, you will guess that Bili is Croatian, or at least ex-Yugoslavian. For a small country, Croatia is a football (soccer to Americans) powerhouse, going all the way to the finals of the world cup (including eliminating England) before losing to France in the final. Bili said that he came to Israel from Yugoslavia with $100 in his pocket, so that's a fast ascent (maybe that's where the Annapurna name comes from). Before they were on stage Anirudh told him that he had come to the US from India with $700 in his pocket. As Bili put it: You were capitalized seven times as well as me! Bili was the founder of Annapurna Labs. They were acquired by Amazon in 2015. I would have liked to have heard more about what exactly they did. I knew only about as much as in this article Amazon Buys Secretive Chip Maker Annapurna Labs for $350M . At the time Amazon AWS acquired them, Annapurna had never announced a product. Bili said that he was driven to found Annapurna when he noticed how lots of huge internet and software companies simply didn't exist 20 years ago. See the picture above. But when he looked at the semiconductor world, it was a different story. He decided to dream big and build the largest semiconductor company on the planet. "Change the world means do everything differently." But as I said above, I still have no idea what they did, or whether they had any unique insight into how to do design, but AWS liked what they saw and acquired them a few years later. He pointed out some key attributes: The cycle of life requires lots of energy. Semiconductor is capital-intensive so need smart investors (Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence's CEO, was on the board and Walden International invested) Execution means the best team, and like a football team that means the best guy in every position The needed smart customers, since the customer is king. So they set up sales in the US (there isn't really a domestic market in Israel) and had no marketing ("this is our marketing team, my three daughters.") Don't be alone, get smart partners. A decade ago everyone was designing their own SerDes, now you can just buy from Cadence AWS were one of their partners. They had had a 7-year lead in cloud computing before anyone else decided it was important. Now everyone is doing it, but it is not easy to catch up from starting 7 years late. "It was clear to us that AWS was the only game in town. They already had over a million customers." More importantly, they had "the same DNA as us." The above diagrams shows how AWS virtualization depends on Annapurna Labs' chips. They had started in top-of-rack (TOR) switch, then multiplied into other areas. They moved network and storage onto their chips. The big split is what is on x86 (clients code) and what is on Annapurna chips. They moved the whole hypervisor so that they provide silicon, hardware, and software. The customer virtual machine runs on x86 but everything else runs on Annapurna chips. They have changed the way that the cloud is built. In 2017, they started to move to AWS for EDA and semiconductor (as did Cadence) and made the first production tapeout in the cloud. It is a great environment because, in traditional EDA, the only certainly is that you always have the wrong number of servers. The Rest of the Day The remainder of the day was taken up, as usual, with lots of parallel technical tracks. Watch for blog posts on a couple of those, but with Jasper User Group, Arm TechCon, and more, it might be a few weeks before that happens. Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email![]()
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