Designing Azure silicon on Azure silicon: EDA workloads on Cobalt 200

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Every Azure chip Microsoft has built started as electronic design automation (EDA) jobs used to design, test, and validate silicon before it is manufactured. This includes simulation sweeps that run for days, verification regressions that fan out across thousands of cores overnight, and physical signoff runs that use hundreds of gigabytes of memory for a single block.

Together, these workloads account for hundreds of millions of compute jobs each year. Today we’re sharing early results from our next step in that evolution: running EDA workloads on Azure Cobalt 200 , Azure’s custom compute infrastructure built on the Arm Neoverse CSS V3.

In our silicon design environment, the evaluated EDA workloads ran with 1.30x to 4.15x more performance than on Cobalt 100 across a range of testing scenarios, from simulation to verification to static timing analysis. Learn more about Azure Cobalt 200 VMs Traditionally, EDA workloads ran on fixed, on-premise x86 server capacity, sized for peak demand with periods of underutilization.

The shift to cloud-based EDA on Microsoft Azure offered a new level of flexibility, scale, and reliability on compute-intensive silicon design workloads. …

azure.microsoft.com