NV30 shown running in hardware....but only at a few KHz...

[no_way]

Just my two cents: i find it hard to believe that the had the COMPLETE NV30 running in FPGA.
http://www.ikos.com/products/VStation30/index.htm
Thats the most powerful station IKOS has to offer, at least according to their website, and it had 30M ASIC gate capacity. With NV30 rumoured to have 120M trans, i dont think it would equate to 30M gates only.

 

[Simon F]

I wonder how many of the "gates" (or area) of the NV30 is SRAM that probably wouldn't be included in the FPGAs.

 

[Maverick]

Like I said, I was just clarifying a point. This is a non-argument.

But they're the best kind!

 

[Humus]

Just my two cents: i find it hard to believe that the had the COMPLETE NV30 running in FPGA.
http://www.ikos.com/products/VStation30/index.htm
Thats the most powerful station IKOS has to offer, at least according to their website, and it had 30M ASIC gate capacity. With NV30 rumoured to have 120M trans, i dont think it would equate to 30M gates only.

If it's 120M transistors they should be able to fit in that 30M gates number. A NAND or NOR gate requires 4 transistors, AND/OR/XOR/XNOR gates requires 6 transistors.

 

[RoOoBo]

And each SRAM cell 6 transistors.

In any case Transistors != Gates.

 

[PSarge]

In any case Transistors != Gates.

...and gates on a chip != gates on an FPGA.

For example the library I'm currently using has cells in it which do complex functions (e.g. half adder cell), but would still be termed as 1 gate. The FPGA may not be able to support that function in a single cell, so may use 2.

 

[pascal]

My guess the IKOS model in the Anandtech´s article is capable of 15millions transistors simulation.

Use 6 transistor per gate (average) and it means up to 90 millions transistors, the rest is SRAM.

 

[T2k]

My guess the IKOS model in the Anandtech´s article is capable of 15millions transistors simulation.

Use 6 transistor per gate (average) and it means up to 90 millions transistors, the rest is SRAM.

Dunno but take a look on the IKOS product pages...

System 9
Modularity 9
ASIC Gate Capacity 30M
Memory Capacity 144 Mbytes
Emulation Speed 500 kHz to 2 MHz
I/O Connections 4608
Probing ~120,000 - what does it means?

 

[MuFu]

Sounds painful.

 

[Basic]

Even if the number of transistors per gate varies widely, it's often concidered to be 4 when talking of bulk counts. I've even seen tools which reported the gate count as true transistor count/4 regardles on how many gates the design had.

Regarding the ~120 000 probes.
The IKOS emulator has a bunch of wires going to an AGP card that sits in a PC that thinks the IKOS is a NV30-card. On the other end of the IKOS, there's a connection to a host computer that can look inside the virtual NV30. The 120k probes are likely "virtual probes" that the host computer can put on internal signals. Like a massive logic analyzer.