As far as processor frequency goes, it stabilizes at 4GHz and its coming down as we move to multi-core processors. So, when you look at it from simulation perspective, post 2005 it is becoming increasingly difficult to run simulations on bigger chips.
Chip size keeps increasing, while processor speed is stagnant and hence, simulation is a limiting factor. Simulation speed is going to be limited unless we move to multi-core processors. Contemporary EDA tools runs RTL simulations in multi-core environment. System Verilog doesn’t run in multi-core environment.
So, test-bench runs on one thread and RTL runs on multiple threads. RTL is more formal in nature, in sense, it can be synthesized, it can be partitioned, different partitions can run on different processors, while testbench is behavioral in nature and it cannot be partitioned the way RTL can
be
So how do we move from below….