Microsoft is working on new Azure instance types that are optimized for Electronics Design Automation. This is a part of a collaborative effort with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The two companies have come together to create a Joint Innovation Lab that will fast track silicon design on the Azure platform.
Microsoft is working on cloud-optimized design solutions and tools combined with methodologies that fully utilize the EDA parallelism.
Silicon gets a boost
This news is good because even though Microsoft offers instances that are suited to specific applications, they do not do much for workloads that are as specific as EDA.
Therefore, Microsoft is trying to get into more opportunities that will give them a competitive edge over the other cloud services providers.
Microsoft is selling this investment as a way to help designers who work with silicon to get more work done faster by availing the resources that they need to make sure that they can run more processes than they would be able to do if they were on-premise.
Rapid scaling is coming soon
Often, EDA design jobs may sometimes take months to complete because of in-house computing limitations, according to Rani Bokar, the corporate Vice President for Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure.
Rani says that if EDA design jobs had access to Azure’s burstable resources, they could scale to tens of thousands of cores very rapidly and achieve faster time to market. The improved efficiency and computing power will see to that and deal with surge demand simultaneously.