Anirudh Fireside Chats with Jensen and Cristiano

At CadenceLIVE 2024 Anirudh Devgan (President and CEO of Cadence) hosted two fireside chats, one with Jensen Huang (President and CEO of NVIDIA) and one with Cristiano Amon (President and CEO of Qualcomm). As you would expect both discussions were engaging and enlightening. What follows are my takeaways from those chats.

Anirudh and Jensen

NVIDIA and Cadence are tight. As one example, NVIDIA have been using Palladium for functional verification for 20 years and Jensen asserted that their latest Blackwell AI chip would not have been possible without Palladium. For him Palladium is emblematic of a general trend to accelerated computing. In many if not most compute-intensive applications perhaps only 3% of the application code accounts for the great majority of the runtime, for which brute-force CPU-based parallelism is the wrong tool for the job.

No big surprise there but that 3% of the code is typically domain specific, especially in important modern applications such as AI, EDA/SDA (SDA is System Design Analysis), aerodynamic and turbine design, and molecular engineering. Boosting performance through CPU parallelism provides rapidly diminishing returns for large workloads at a heavy premium in cost and power. Domain specific accelerators like Cadence Palladium, Protium and Millennium, and the NVIDIA AI accelerators deliver 1000X or more performance boost at a tiny fraction of the cost and power of a 1000 CPUs. This is what makes today’s big AI and big chip design possible.

A very revealing comment from Jensen was that NVIDIA designs their circuits, chips, PCBs, systems, and datacenters with Cadence. While I’m sure NVIDIA also uses tools from other EDA/SDA vendors in a variety of functions, the span of collaboration between NVIDIA and Cadence is much wider than I had realized. That collaboration clearly is tight in emulation and in formal verification, also it extends to the Reality Digital Twin Platform for datacenter design, now integrated with NVIDIA’s Omniverse™ platform. I expect this collaboration will blossom further through Cadence multiphysics analytics for power/heating, and computational fluid dynamics for cooling as design center power management imperatives grow.

Details on the GPU behind the Cadence Millennium accelerator are hard to find but at least one press release suggests this involved collaboration between Cadence and NVIDIA. Further, Cadence’s Orion molecular design platform is integrated with NVIDIA’s BioNeMo generative AI platform. Looks to me like the Cadence/NVIDIA partnership is already more than a conventional customer/supplier relationship.

Anirudh and Cristiano

Qualcomm and Cadence have also been partnered for a long time, though here I infer a more traditional if also successful relationship. Cristiano stressed appreciation of Cadence’s evolving AI-based design capabilities and performance/capacity advances in the product line, to help them keep pace with growing and ever more demanding roadmap targets. My takeaways from this talk are more around the Cristiano/Qualcomm vision of trends in mobile and mobile-adjacent opportunities, themselves very interesting.

Qualcomm continues to see their differentiated advantage in communication and high-performance low power mobile platforms. Their strategy is to build around these core strengths in the markets they consider most promising. One such market he describes as the merger of physical and digital worlds in VR/AR, more generally XR where he sees glasses as a big opportunity, today partnering with Meta, Samsung, and others. Not a new idea of course but backed by Qualcomm communication superiority perhaps this area could be ripe for rapid growth.

A second opportunity is in the car (the auto electronics market is high on everyone’s list). Qualcomm is apparently doing very well with automakers, building on their established Snapdragon track record in mobile performance, an immersive experience, and AI capability. I have heard from another source that Qualcomm is now a common choice for the infotainment chip. Cristiano hinted that Qualcomm’s role may already extend further. For example, he talks of training an LLM model on the entire car digital operating manual, enabling you to directly ask (voice based I guess) a question if something goes wrong. Better yet, Qualcomm is partnered with Salesforce so you can ask the LLM to schedule a service appointment, which will then channel straight through to the dealer.

He mentioned several other opportunities, but I’ll call out one I find striking, which he calls convergence of mobile and the PC. Imagine you see on your phone an email that requires an involved reply. Today you might wait till you get back to your laptop, but with Copilot maybe you have it draft a reply with prompts to include points you consider important to stress. I can certainly see this being a more appealing mobile use-model for Copilot than on a laptop. Allowing for iteration on prompts, such a use-model could be a pretty convenient way to reply to a lot of email. Maybe even to handle other tasks from your phone.

In the same vein, he sees an opportunity to redefine the PC market with their new Snapdragon X Elite which he believes will push Windows laptops back into the lead in performance, in battery life and (I would assume) in native connectivity. All on a common laptop/handset platform (looking at you Apple). Microsoft is apparently very enthusiastic about this direction.

My summary takeaways

Both talks highlighted for me all 3 companies transitioning from established market roles (EDA/SDA and semiconductor) to larger systems roles. They also stressed the importance of co-design with market leaders to guide growth in unfamiliar territory. Exciting times for all 3 companies. You can learn more about Cadence Reality Digital Twin Platform HERE, and the Cadence/NVIDIA collaboration in molecular science HERE.

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