Mentor, a Siemens business, has revealed that artificial intelligence (AI) processing leader Graphcore leveraged Mentor’s Questa™ software for simulation and verification of IP technologies to rapidly verify Graphcore’s massive Colossus GC2 Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU). Colossus has been shipping to early access customers for over a year and is now shipping in production volume.
Engineered to boost the performance of machine intelligence models for both training and inference, Graphcore’s Colossus IPU is one of the most sophisticated processors ever created. Featuring a novel architecture, Colossus integrates 23.6 billion transistors and more than 1,000 IPU-Cores.
To help streamline IC verification for this immense design, Graphcore selected Mentor’s Questa RTL simulation flow, in conjunction with Mentor’s Questa Verification IP (QVIP) solution for PCI Express. These Questa tools helped streamline Graphcore’s design productivity by providing rigorous protocol verification, while supporting efficient and highly compliant implementation of the SystemVerilog IEEE standard.
“Mentor’s Questa solutions delivered the capacity, tools, IP and trusted verification flow we needed for a design of this size and complexity,” said Phil Horsfield, vice president of Silicon at Graphcore. “The performance and capacity of Mentor’s Questa solutions allowed us to focus on our differentiating IP, which helped us deliver a truly unique and compelling end-product.”
