Something to look ahead to: InspireSemi is betting massive on its “supercomputer-on-a-chip” product known as Thunderbird. The firm 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. Four chips might be put in on a single accelerator card, in a kind issue comparable to a GPU. This configuration brings the complete variety of cores per card to 6,144, with the potential to scale to multi-processors in a single cluster linked utilizing high-speed serial interconnect.
That seems like a variety of horsepower, however who is 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 means present HPC workloads operating on CPUs ought to have little to no customized code to run in Thunderbird. Also, the product is adaptable to present server infrastructure as it is a PCI add-on card, permitting InspireSemi to attain extra clients who wouldn’t have the funds to construct out new infrastructure and amenities.
According to InspireSemi, the processor’s open-source design and agnostic software program permits them to goal many industries: “Thunderbird accelerates many critical applications in important industries that other approaches do not, including life sciences, genomics, medical devices, climate change research, and applications that require deep simulation and modeling” mentioned the firm’s founder and CTO Andy Gray.
Thunderbird means to inherit the energy effectivity of the RISC-based structure. InspireSemi claims a 30-60% energy effectivity in contrast to equally succesful options. One metric is up to 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 pace at which corporations are using open-source options is outstanding. The Unified Acceleration Foundation’s (UXL) mission is to develop common requirements for vendor-agnostic {hardware} and software program, with Intel being one in every of the essential contributors by way of its oneAPI framework.
If open-source initiatives for constructing a extra open platform proceed to acquire momentum, then corporations like InspireSemi could have a shiny future.