Subject: Mentor Veloce marketing busted for out-of-date benchmark data

>10.) Mentor Veloce this year now runs the ARM VSTREAM, which eliminates
>     the need for JTAG HW probe.  "Last we heard VSTREAM on Palladium ran
>     1X the speed [no improvement] of a serial JTAG.  VSTREAM on Veloce
>     runs 10X faster than JTAG."  (booth 1383)  Ask for Jim Kenney.
>
>         - from http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad061010.html#10


From: Javier Orensanz <javier.orensanz=user domain=arm not calm>

Hello John,

I'm afraid I noticed a mistake on your webpage.

I am the product manager for ARM debug tools and hardware, including the new
ARM VSTREAM product. 

This is not a fair statement by Mentor.  In fact VSTREAM runs on Palladium
at similar speeds as Veloce.  Although it's sometimes difficult to compare
the two, there's definitely not an order of magnitude speed difference.

    - Javier Orensanz
      ARM Ltd.                                   Cambridge, England

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From: Ran Avinun <ran=user domain=cadence not calm>

Hi, John,

The statement by Mentor Veloce it not correct.  VSTREAM's performance
over JTAG was never 1x.  ARM has confirmed that both Mentor Veloce and
Cadence Palladium performance over JTAG are at par.

During DAC this year, one of our demos showed incredible performance
improvement of Palladium XP running at 4.3 MHz -- compared to 1.5 MHz
with Palladium III.

Overall DAC was an excellent show for us.  My team had 22 major customer
meetings.  Our High-Level Synthesis (HLS) panel had 100+ people in the
audience including all 6 major C vendors.  With the exception of BlueSpec
(System Verilog) and Mentor (mostly ANSI C) all the other vendors showed
strong commitment to support SystemC as their main entry language.  When
we planned this panel a year ago, the picture was a bit different...

    - Ran Avinun
      Cadence Design Systems                     San Jose, CA

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From: Jim Kenney <jim_kenney=user domain=mentor not calm>

Hi John,

Seems my data on ARM VSTREAM on Palladium is, well a bit dated.  The
VSTREAM transactor came up very quickly on Veloce and with some minor
tuning is running 10X faster than serial JTAG.  Roughly 6 weeks later
I heard it was running on Palladium at serial JTAG speed.

After your Cheesy Must See List for DAC was published, I received an
update from ARM stating that VSTREAM is *now* running at comparable
speeds on both Veloce and Palladium.  After all that time, it seems
some additional tuning was done on Palladium to improve its VSTREAM
performance.

    - Jim Kenney
      Mentor Graphics                            Wilsonville, OR