One thing to stay up for: InspireSemi is betting large on its “supercomputer-on-a-chip” product known as Thunderbird. The corporate believes that leveraging open-source RISC-V structure and agnostic software program compatibility makes its PCI add-in card extra reasonably priced, 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 will be put in on a single accelerator card, in a kind issue just like a GPU. This configuration brings the whole variety of cores per card to six,144, with the potential to scale to multi-processors in a single cluster related utilizing high-speed serial interconnect.
That appears like a number of horsepower, however who’s it geared towards? InspireSemi says their product addresses a number of vital areas of HPC workloads.
Thunderbird makes use of normal CPU programming fashions and compiles with out creating workloads on customized platforms like Nvidia’s CUDA or AMD’s ROCm. This implies current HPC workloads operating on CPUs ought to have little to no customized code to run in Thunderbird. Additionally, the product is adaptable to current server infrastructure as it is a PCI add-on card, permitting InspireSemi to succeed in extra clients who should not have 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 vital purposes in necessary industries that different approaches don’t, together with life sciences, genomics, medical units, 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 ability 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 towards Nvidia’s Ampere A100 at 19.5 FP64 TFLOPS, it sounds promising contemplating that Thunderbird’s pricing would begin at $6,500.
The pace at which firms are using open-source options is outstanding. 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 most important 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 vibrant future.