Achim Nohl
Achim Nohl is a solution architect at Synopsys, responsible for virtual prototypes in context of software development and verification. Achim holds a diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from the Institute for Integrated Signal Processing Systems at the Aachen University of Technology, Germany. Before joining Synopsys, Achim has been working in various engineering and marketing roles for LISATek and CoWare.Selling Free Stuff? Sounds hard!
Posted by frank schirrmeister on June 22nd, 2009
You may remember this story from Red Hat. A couple of years ago I heard a presentation from a Red Hat representative, who was telling a story from the early days. At a time when Red Hat tried to figure out their business model, a couple of key executives went on an offsite and as part of that were kayaking in Colorado or another equally beautiful area. The guide they had taking care of them asked them after a while “so, what are y’all doing here, what line of work are you in”. The team apparently replied with “We are trying to find out how to sell free stuff”. Allegedly the guide thought for a while and then came back with “Well, good luck. Sounds hard!”.
Apparently it is still hard to make money with free stuff. Which brings me to Imperas and OVP. First I need a disclaimer: I have been their VP Marketing in 2006/2007. In my judgment their technology for processor modeling is cool and well thought out, probably the best I have seen so far – for processor modeling that is. They are also a partner for our System-Level Catalyst program here at Synopsys.
Imperas recently announced that they support the OSCI SystemC TLM-2.0 APIs. This – in my mind – has made them a valid player for processor models as SystemC TLM-2.0 is now the standards on which all vendors in the virtual platform space keep their models interoperable.
On the commercial side, Imperas recently announced some license changes:
Until now, OVPsim has been available on Linux to Imperas commercial customers only and was funded by their commercial contracts. We are now making OVPsim available on Linux to the wider OVP community.
To enable and fund this, from the new release, OVPsim will only be free for non-commercial usage. Commercial use of OVPsim on Windows or Linux will now require a commercial license from Imperas with pricing from $300/month per user. Commercial users can download and use the free OVPsim for evaluation purposes.
So this means that to simulate processor models, the price for the OVP offering just went from free on Windows (Linux was always charged for as the first sentence above shows) to $3600 per year per license on both platforms. This is an interesting step. Soon we will know, whether OVP users were actually interested in the openness of the APIs for processor modeling or in the aspect of free simulation. There is an interesting Blog post on this at Golden Pebbles, called “On Free, Open Source and VRM”, from which I borrowed the drawing on the left. I think the “free-ness” deserves an even bigger bubble in relationship to the “open-ness”, but time will tell. And when it comes to openness, the APIs for SystemC TLM-2.0 to enable model interoperability were open all along, so were the Freescale ADL descriptions for processor modeling, even prior to OVP.
Overall this is another interesting twist in the discussion where the value for vendors is in virtual platforms. Is it simulation? Or debugging? The models? The tools enabling virtual platform development? It looks like the concept of completely free simulation to enable other tools around it – like Imperas had indicated in an interview around the “Blue Ocean Strategy” – did not quite work out from a commercial perspective. It is an interesting experiment though.
Here at Synopsys our slogan has been for quite some time “it’s all about the models”. It has been the major driving thought for our DesignWare System-Level Library, which works in all SystemC compatible environments. More models being SystemC TLM-2.0 compatible – like the OVP models – can only help to further fuel adoption of SystemC based virtual platforms.
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Thanks Frank for the plug of Open Virtual Platforms (OVP), which you correctly noticed is now charging for its OVPsim simulator on a Windows host, as well as for OVPsim on a Linux host.
We made this change after considering the responses from a survey we send out to the 1,000+ people registered on the OVP website. The feedback was that users wanted a maintained and supported closed source simulator — OVPsim is maintained and supported by Imperas. — and wanted open source models that the community could develop, evolve, and use for free.
As you can imagine, we were surprised that users wanted to pay for simulation and have models for free, but if you think about it you really do need a community developing models. Also, these models should come from the IP providers or the hardware developers, and this is what the OVP modeling technology enables.
As you rightly point out, the OVP processor modeling technology is probably the best approach in the industry. In fact there are now many users building models of standard processors and even releasing their own, e.g. VinChip. We have an average of about 2 new processors/variants being made available to OVP users every month. In the next release of OVP there are some 12 new ARM models – all free to use and available open source – and running up to 1.2 Billion instructions a second.
So actually – the Blue Ocean is working out just fine… we are just listening and responding to our users/customers.
As we are one of the founding memebers of your System-Level Catalyst program, we look forward to you and your customers using the fast OVP processor models in your virtual platform SystemC TLM-2.0 simulations, as all OVP CPU models include native TLM-2.0 interfaces.
Well, sometimes you find people who don’t know what they are selling, as the tour guid in your story: this guy was actually selling free stuff – the scenery and adventure on Colorado River.
You have to know your business and your market to be succesfull.
The Red Hat Guys happily payed for the means to get to that nature experience. If for the OVP users the simulator is the means to get the simulation done, Imperas might be right.
Regards
uli
Another interesting aspect of the Imperas turnaround is that this means that a commercial body now has to pay to develop models. Since they cannot run them without the core simulator to test them, they will have to pay Imperas the commercial fee. Essentially, Imperas thus leaves it up to hobbyists to increase the model library.
As you say, quite interesting.