Europe Readies its First Prototype of Custom HPC Processor

European Processor Initiative (EPI) is a Europe’s undertaking to kickstart a homegrown growth of customized processors tailor-made in direction of totally different utilization fashions that the European Union may want. The first process of EPI is to create a customized processor for high-performance computing purposes like machine studying, and the chip prototypes are already on their means. The EPI chairman of the board Jean-Marc Denis lately spoke to the Next Platform and confirmed some info concerning the processor design targets and the timeframe of launch.

Supposed to be manufactured on TSMC’s 6 nm EUV (TSMC N6 EUV) expertise, the EPI processor will tape-out on the finish of 2020 or the start of 2021, and it’s going to be heterogeneous. That signifies that on its 2.5D die, many alternative IPs shall be current. The processor will use a customized ARM CPU, primarily based on a “Zeus” iteration of Neoverese server core, meant for general-purpose computation duties like operating the OS. When it involves the special-purpose chips, EPI will incorporate a chip named Titan – a RISC-V primarily based processor that makes use of vector and tensor processing models to compute AI duties. The Titan will use each new normal for AI processing, together with FP32, FP64, INT8, and bfoat16. The system will use HBM reminiscence allotted to the Titan processor, have DDR5 hyperlinks for the CPU, and have PCIe 5.zero for the internal connection.