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One thing to stay up for: InspireSemi is betting huge on its “supercomputer-on-a-chip” product referred to as Thunderbird. The corporate believes that leveraging open-source RISC-V structure and agnostic software program compatibility makes its PCI add-in card extra inexpensive, accessible, and environment friendly than its opponents.
The Austin-based semiconductor firm InspireSemi introduced that it has tapped out its first Thunderbird “supercomputer-on-a-chip” comprising 1,536 64-bit superscalar RISC-V CPU cores. 4 chips may be put in on a single accelerator card, in a kind issue just like a GPU. This configuration brings the entire variety of cores per card to six,144, with the potential to scale to multi-processors in a single cluster linked utilizing high-speed serial interconnect.
That seems like quite a lot of horsepower, however who’s it geared towards? InspireSemi says their product addresses a number of essential areas of HPC workloads.
Thunderbird makes use of commonplace CPU programming fashions and compiles with out creating workloads on customized platforms like Nvidia’s CUDA or AMD’s ROCm. This implies present HPC workloads working on CPUs ought to have little to no customized code to run in Thunderbird. Additionally, the product is adaptable to present server infrastructure as it is a PCI add-on card, permitting InspireSemi to succeed in extra clients who do not need the funds to construct out new infrastructure and services.
In keeping with InspireSemi, the processor’s open-source design and agnostic software program permits them to focus on many industries: “Thunderbird accelerates many essential purposes in vital industries that different approaches don’t, together with life sciences, genomics, medical gadgets, local weather change analysis, and purposes that require deep simulation and modeling” mentioned the corporate’s founder and CTO Andy Grey.
Thunderbird means to inherit the facility effectivity of the RISC-based structure. InspireSemi claims a 30-60% energy effectivity in comparison with equally succesful options. One metric is as much as 24 FP64 TFLOPS at 50 GFLOPS/W (480W). The comparability is made in opposition to Nvidia’s Ampere A100 at 19.5 FP64 TFLOPS, it sounds promising contemplating that Thunderbird’s pricing would begin at $6,500.
The velocity at which firms are using open-source options is exceptional. The Unified Acceleration Basis’s (UXL) mission is to develop common requirements for vendor-agnostic {hardware} and software program, with Intel being one of many essential contributors by way of its oneAPI framework.
If open-source initiatives for constructing a extra open platform proceed to achieve momentum, then firms like InspireSemi could have a vivid future.
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