Recently, RISC-V startup Ventana Microsystems began designing and releasing the world’s first server-based processor – the Veyron V1 – using advanced 5nm process technology. This new server processor will put the startup in direct competition with AMD and Intel with their server processors, EPYC and Xeon, respectively. This news comes from today’s RISC-V Summit in San Jose, California.
Startup Ventana Microsystems aims to get AMD and Intel into the loop of server-side processors with RISC-V chips, Veyron V1
The RISC-V architecture is mostly used in the IoT, or Internet of Things market, due to its ability to provide energy efficient use, open source capability, edge guidance, and the extensibility of its devices. It would make sense for it to expand its technology more widely, including servers and data centers, which have become a mainstay in today’s society.
Veyron’s new V1 chip introduces a RISC-V core built on the 5nm process technology. The chip offers an eight-line design, frequencies of up to 3.6GHz, and 16 cores per cluster, with a total of 192 cores. The Veyron V1 chip also has 48MB of L3 cache, can support “out of order execution”, and features advanced security via side-channel attack mitigation, IOMMU and AIA technologies, comprehensive RAS functionality, and a top-down performance tuning software methodology.
The most important part of Veyron introducing this segment to a larger market is the ability to use it in more products and services. You see, Veyron hopes to use the V1 chip in many different server tasks for storage, web hosting, data centers, and streaming services.
The overall design of the chip features a layout structure similar to AMD’s new EPYC processors, with data interfaces along one side of the chip, memory on each side, and PCIe Gen5 (with backwards compatibility with Gen4). The Die-to-Die (D2D) interface is compatible with Harness of Wire (HoW) and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), which are also supported by larger companies such as AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Arm, as well as many more.
Drew Henry, executive vice president of strategy and marketing at Arm, is welcome to not only see more competition in the ecosystem but also from new faces like Ventana Microsystems. He states that as the need for hardware for HPC, cloud, AI, and more grows, more companies involved will help rather than hinder the market, allowing the technology to thrive and not be held up by supply shortages. Arm executives say, “We respect RISC-V, but it’s not competitive yet.”
The new Veyron V1 was pushed to be used by more companies to speed up company growth and manufacturing costs to produce more chips. The company is looking to shorten the development period by two years, saving over $75 million in research and development alone.
News sources: MyDrivers, IT Home