Verification Challenges of Workload Optimized Hardware Systems

Abstract

Over the last couple of years it became more and more obvious that improvements in chip technology get smaller and smaller with each generation. Processor frequency is stagnating for some time now and single thread performance of general purpose processor cores is only increasing very slowly from generation to generation despite the fact that designers have more and more transistors they can utilize.

However, to stay competitive in the Compute Server business it is necessary to follow Moore’s law and provide significant performance improvements to the customer every year. This begs the question how this can be achieved when traditional ways like cycle time improvements and the usage of more transistors are not yielding the desired results. The answer has to be a combination of logic, system and software design.

This talk will first describe why continuing with “business as usual” will fail going forward. It will then discuss a number of scenarios for workload optimized systems to overcome these hurdles before the focus will shift to the question: What challenges will that present to the area of hardware verification?

Speaker Bio

Klaus-Dieter Schubert received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering in 1990 from Stuttgart University (Germany). Subsequently, he joined IBM in Boeblingen and has been responsible for hardware verification of various IBM mainframe systems and its components. He was the technical lead for the hardware verification of the z900 2064 system before he moved to the field of hardware and software co-verification where he established the concept of virtual power-on (VPO) for zSeries and pSeries systems. From 2006 to 2008, Mr. Schubert was on a work assignment in Austin, Texas, where he has led the verification team for the POWER7 microprocessor. Today he is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the technical leader for the hardware verification of future POWER processors. He has received two IBM Outstanding Achievement Awards for his contributions in the field of hardware verification.