Imec InspireSemi Achieves Milestone: Tape Out RISC-V AI Chip with 1536 Cores

US startup Inspire Semiconductor has collaborated with Belgian research lab imec to develop a groundbreaking chip design featuring 1,536 64-bit custom RISC-V CPU cores interconnected with low latency. The chip, known as the 24TOPS RISC-V Thunderbird 1, is currently in the fabrication process at TSMC. It is noteworthy that four of these chips will be integrated into a PCIe server card designed to support double precision 64-bit FP64 calculations.

Targeted towards High Performance Computing (HPC), AI, graph analytics, and other compute-intensive tasks, the Thunderbird 1 chip offers exceptional capabilities. It allows for the connection of arrays comprising up to 256 Thunderbird chips through high-speed SERDES transceivers, enabling scalable and powerful computing solutions.

Collaborating with various industry partners, Inspire Semiconductor has joined forces with Scottish software specialist CodePlay, an Intel company, and chip designer GUC in Taiwan. This strategic partnership aims to enhance the Thunderbird 1 chip's performance and versatility, catering to a wide range of applications.

According to Inspire Semiconductor, Thunderbird outperforms modern datacentre GPUs in terms of raw computational power and application versatility for real-world HPC software and codes. The CPU-centric approach and PCIe card configuration are particularly well-suited for handling large graph analytics workloads, essential in sectors such as fraud detection, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, pharma clinical trials, and supply chain management.

Expressing pride in the team's achievement, Ron Van Dell, CEO of InspireSemi, stated, “We are proud of the accomplishment of our engineering and operations team to finish the Thunderbird I design and submit it to our supply chain partners, TSMC, ASE, and imec for production. We expect to begin customer deliveries in the fourth quarter.” Alex Gray, Founder, CTO, and President of InspireSemi, added, “This is a major milestone for our company and an exciting time to be bringing this versatile accelerated computing solution to market. 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.”