Why It’s Important: The auto industry has been trying to move toward the software-defined promise by using a hypervisor for software virtualization, creating a bottleneck that cannot scale with the performance demands of todays workloads. Intel’s silicon-enforced separation enables a direct path, bypassing the hypervisor, and opens up additional performance within the software for higher quality and new workloads that will unlock the next-gen features and services consumers crave.
How It Works: Think for a moment of the compute needed to power an SDV as if it were an electric vehicle (EV) with a fully charged battery. It is generally accepted that if it leaves home (Point A) to go directly to its set destination (Point B), it optimizes performance, in this case the vehicle’s range. That’s how Intel’s silicon-enforced virtualization works – it makes an efficient trip to the hardware. But if the EV is forced to make a detour to an alternative location (Point C), it must use up vital energy, and the trip takes longer. This forced “detour” is similar to the experience delivered by other silicon providers. Namely, too much of the virtualization functionality is implemented in software – that trip to Point C – before the workload gets to the underlying hardware. The detour, ultimately, leads to significant performance degradation.
Car journey analogies aside, more technical specificity around the journey shows the benefits that Intel’s market-leading virtualization capabilities deliver, in this case through the graphics processing unit (GPU).