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Hardware Technology

First RISC-V Computer Chip Lands At the European Processor Initiative (theregister.com) 27

Posted by BeauHD from the rapid-turnaround dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has run the successful first test of its RISC-V-based European Processor Accelerator (EPAC), touting it as the initial step towards homegrown supercomputing hardware. EPI, launched back in 2018, aims to increase the independence of Europe's supercomputing industry from foreign technology companies. At its heart is the adoption of the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture for the development and production of high-performance chips within Europe's borders. The project's latest milestone is the delivery of 143 samples of EPAC chips, accelerators designed for high-performance computing applications and built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture. Designed to prove the processor's design, the 22nm test chips -- fabbed at GlobalFoundries, the not-terribly-European semiconductor manufacturer spun out of AMD back in 2009 -- have passed initial testing, running a bare-metal "hello, world" program as proof of life.

It's a rapid turnaround. The EPAC design was proven on FPGA in March and the project announced silicon tape-out for the test chips in June -- hitting a 26.97mm2 area with 14 million placeable instances, equivalent to 93 million gates, including 991 memory instances. While the FPGA variant, which implemented a subset of the functions of the full EPAC design, was shown booting a Linux operating system, the physical test chips have so far only been tested with basic bare-metal workloads -- leaving plenty of work to be done. Earlier today, the UK government released its 10-year plan to make the country a global "artificial intelligence superpower," seeking to rival the likes of the U.S. and China. "The so-called 'National Artificial Intelligence Strategy' is designed to boost the use of AI among the nation's businesses, attract international investment into British AI companies and develop the next generation of homegrown tech talent," reports CNBC.
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First RISC-V Computer Chip Lands At the European Processor Initiative More

First RISC-V Computer Chip Lands At the European Processor Initiative

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  • They laud the "free and open source" RISC-V ISA and software, as well as freedom from patents.... but how much of their design is going to be open source? And will it be free of patents?

    • The biggest part of a super computer isn't even the instruction set. A lot has to do with the buses and fabric and network. Architecturally how do you get thousands of cores to work together on a problem. There are number of ways to solve this, many the basis of someone's thesis paper.

      • Architecturally how do you get thousands of cores to work together on a problem.

        Put multiple cores and FPGA fabric on the same die. Then configure the connections in software for each application.

        • Interesting. Are there any actual designs that work like this in a real supercomputer? With Zynq, Cyclone V and EOS-S3 this is becoming more of a thing with Microcontrollers but I have not heard of this for high performance CPUs.

        • They already do that.
          But you run into the physical limits of 3-dimensional space.
          At some point you can't cool it anymore due to the surface area being too small for the volume, or the distances get big enough for travel times to just naturally slow it down, or both.
          The only way I know to solve this, in the medium run, is superconduction or maybe photonic processors. And probably still coolant pipes going straight through the silicon in all directions.
          At least outside of the question of parallelizability.

  • EPI, launched back in 2018, aims to increase the independence of Europe's supercomputing industry from foreign technology companies.

    Like TSMC for example. Oh wait...

  • The biggest and most important test is 'What's in it for me' test. A compelling use case, over other stuff. So far Nvidia decided V makes most sense in graphics cards, register rich, modified. So I expect EU will have to cleanroom some graphics software, and give it away for free. However when things shrink to 3nm fabs, you can do things not possible at 28. Where latency and jitter, critically effect what can be done. Now doing an IBM, and having 220 cores on one chip may be the way forward. But not at 28nm
  • So companies with an international presence like Intel, TSMC, AMD, and Nvidia (presences in Taiwan, China, the US, Israel, Ireland, the list goes on) aren't enough. Nor apparently is ARM, because gasp it's technically owned by some company in Japan even though it's headquartered in the UK and has research labs all over the world (including France) and... you know I don't think explaining that the world doesn't work the way moronically paranoid nationalists or befuddled politicians think it does is even usef

    • You have lived in an era of remarkable peace and tranquility. As a general rule, humanity has periodically faced major wars in which decency and civilization could have perished were it not for political leaders defending their NATIONAL interests and planning to be reasonably self-sufficient in critical industries. When major wars occur, you're going to be in a world of hurt if all your defense needs are provided by a country that's on the other side in the fight.

      The fact that YOU might think of yourself as

      • The aforementioned North Korean dictator and the Taliban style themselves as leaders defending their national interests so what is your point really?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Saffaya ( 702234 )

          "Si vis pacem parabellum"

          If you want peace, prepare for war.

          Examples.
          Alexander had an army powerful enough to conquer Sparta. Yet, he didn't bother. Knowing how many of the spartans would fight him to to the death made the gain/pain ratio way to small.

          Sovet Russia invaded Finland. Yet, the Fins' fierce resistance proved so costly to the Red Army that they sought a truce and left Finland alone to continue their conquest of European countries. The gain/pain ratio was too small.

          You want peace? Make yourself as

          • That is blatant history revisionism. That truce you are talking about was a conditional surrender - Finland lost that war and a huge chunk of territory with it, part of it for a while (Hanko), part of it for good (most of Karelia). All in all, had Finland agreed to Stalin's terms before the war (land exchange), they would have been far better off. The whole war has been a senseless waste of human life and resulted in much harsher outcome for Finland. Moreover, Finland also lost the rematch, losing even more

  • I am going to assume that was not a ICE 40 that was used?

    • RISC-V soft-cores can run on many mid-range FPGAs, including Xilinx Spartan-6, Intel Cyclone, etc.

      There is also the PolarFire SOC, which integrates a multi-core RISC-V hard-core with about 500k logic elements of FPGA fabric.

      Expect to see more options in the near future.

    • Regarding your sig: They are exactly the same! It's just that you are a selfish psychopath, and prefer what feels good to you, as you are too stupid to think about the backlash. Something literally monkeys, crows and squirrels have been shown to get. Congrats!

  • Earlier today, the UK government released its 10-year plan to make the country a global "artificial intelligence superpower,"

    This will either be a complete lie to impress the voters or an attempt to steal taxpayers money by having a mate's company produce a report at great expense which will go nowhere. The uk is now a kleptocracy.

  • running a bare-metal "hello, world" program as proof of life.

    Wow, think of all the great advances Europe will be able to foster once they can run "Hello, world!" at 100,000 terraflops!

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