Cadence Unveils M2000 Supercomputer with NVIDIA to Transform AI-Driven Design in Silicon, Systems, and Drugs

At the 2025 CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley event, Cadence (NASDAQ: CDNS) unveiled the new Millennium M2000 supercomputer, a groundbreaking platform that integrates NVIDIA’s Blackwell system. This advanced supercomputer aims to support cutting-edge AI models, accelerating simulations in fields like electronic design automation (EDA), system design and analysis (SDA), and drug discovery, thereby significantly boosting designer productivity. Cause: The rapid advancement of AI technology has increased the demand for high-performance computing, particularly in complex engineering and scientific research. Traditional CPU systems have fallen short in meeting the needs for efficient and swift simulations. Cadence, recognizing this gap, embarked on a mission to develop a more advanced supercomputer platform to address these challenges, leveraging the latest hardware and software innovations from NVIDIA. Development: The Millennium M2000 supercomputer combines Cadence’s state-of-the-art solvers with NVIDIA’s HGX B200 system, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell server edition GPU, and CUDA-X libraries and solver software. This integration not only drastically reduces simulation run times but also enhances performance by up to 80 times compared to CPU-based systems, while simultaneously lowering energy consumption by 20 times. The collaborative effort between Cadence and NVIDIA involved years of research, with Cadence re-engineering its software to fully exploit the capabilities of NVIDIA’s hardware advancements. Results: The Millennium M2000 supercomputer has demonstrated significant potential across multiple sectors: Semiconductor and 3D-IC Design: As the first dedicated AI simulator for this field, M2000 incorporates various physical simulation capabilities, including power, thermal management, stress/warp, and electromagnetic properties. It significantly improves the analysis and optimization efficiency of 3D-IC and advanced packaging designs. For instance, chip-level power integrity simulations that traditionally take weeks can now be completed in less than a day. Autonomous System Design: The supercomputer accelerates the design and operation of data center digital twins, optimizing resource utilization and reducing energy consumption. It enables high-fidelity and high-capacity virtual simulations, mirroring real-world conditions with precision. This technology aids the rapid decision-making processes for electronics and mechatronic systems, such as wind tunnel testing, thereby enhancing the design and operational efficiency of autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots. Life Science Innovation: Cadence’s Molecular Sciences platform benefits immensely from the M2000 supercomputer, speeding up the drug discovery process. Pharmaceutical clients can perform more simulations in a shorter time, increasing the throughput and scalability of candidate drug screening. The Orion molecular design platform, available via Cadence OnCloud, allows researchers to explore numerous design iterations more quickly, driving faster innovation and product development. Customer Feedback and Availability: The Millennium M2000 supercomputer is now available for both cloud and on-premises deployment. Several prominent companies, including Ascendance, Boom Supersonic, MediaTek, Supermicro, and Treeline Biosciences, have already provided positive feedback, highlighting the system’s superior performance in enhancing simulation efficiency and reducing energy usage. These testimonials are featured on Cadence’s official website. Industry Insights: NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the importance of the new infrastructure category, termed the "science AI factory," during a keynote conversation with Cadence President and CEO Anirudh Devgan. He stated, "From biology to chip design, the most complex engineering challenges require simulations at unprecedented speeds and scales, which traditional computing simply cannot achieve." Huang further noted that the collaboration between NVIDIA and Cadence represents a leap forward in solving critical design challenges across industries, such as thermomechanical simulation in chip design, fluid dynamics in aerospace, and molecular dynamics in drug development. Technical Capabilities: The Millennium M2000 supercomputer is designed to handle the most demanding AI workloads, offering unparalleled computational power and efficiency. NVIDIA’s Blackwell system and RTX PRO 6000 GPU provide the necessary hardware foundation, while CAD software optimized for these platforms ensures that engineers and researchers can model and simulate highly complex systems with greater accuracy. Nvidia's Blackwell engineering team leveraged Cadence's Palladium and Protium platforms for design validation and chip startup workflows, demonstrating the interoperability and effectiveness of the combined technologies. Digital Twin Integration: To enhance the design and operation of next-generation AI factories, Cadence integrated its Orion molecular design platform with NVIDIA’s BioNeMo NIM microservices and its JedAI platform with NVIDIA Llama Nemotron inference models. Additionally,Cadence utilized NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint to develop the AI Factory Digital Twin platform, allowing engineers to test and optimize power, cooling, and network configurations before actual deployment. This capability expedites configuration decisions and prepares the groundwork for future AI facilities. Impact and Future Prospects: This collaboration between Cadance and NVIDIA has not only elevated computational efficiencies but also paved the way for innovative breakthroughs across various disciplines. Industry experts view this as a transformative development, noting that it makes complex simulations more viable, thus speeding up the product development cycle. The combination of Cadence’s expertise in computational EDA solutions and NVIDIA’s leadership in GPU and AI computing marks a significant milestone in the technology sector. Company Profiles: Cadence is a global leader in electronic design automation (EDA) solutions, recognized for its Intelligent System Design™ strategy. The company’s design solutions are widely adopted by leading semiconductor and system companies for applications ranging from hyperscale computing and mobile communications to automotive, aerospace, drug design, and robotics. In 2024, Cadence was named one of the world's best-managed companies by The Wall Street Journal. NVIDIA, a pioneer in GPU and AI computing, continues to push technological boundaries with its hardware systems and software libraries. Together, these two companies are reshaping the landscape of high-performance computing and accelerating scientific discoveries. The launch of the Millennium M2000 supercomputer is a testament to their commitment to innovation and collaboration. More details about Cadence’s offerings and partnerships can be found at www.cadence.com.