European Processor Initiative Announces EPAC1.0 RISC-V Test Chip Taped-out

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www.hpcwire.com, Jun. 01, 2021 – 

June 1, 2021 – The European Processor Initiative (EPI), a project with 28 partners from 10 European countries, with the goal of helping the EU achieve independence in HPC chip technologies and HPC infrastructure, is proud to announce that we have successfully released our EPAC1.0 Test Chip for fabrication.

epi-logoOne key segment of EPI activities is to develop and demonstrate fully European-grown processor IPs based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture, providing power-efficient and high-throughput accelerator cores named EPAC (European Processor Accelerators). Using the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture will allow leveraging open-source resources at hardware architecture and software level, as well as ensure independence from non-European patented computing technologies.

EPAC combines several accelerator technologies specialized for different application areas. The test chip, shown in figure 1 below, contains four vector processing micro-tiles (VPU) composed of an Avispado RISC-V core designed by SemiDynamics and a vector processing unit designed by Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the University of Zagreb. Each tile also contains a Home Node and L2 cache, designed respectively by Chalmers and FORTH, that provide a coherent view of the memory subsystem. The Stencil and Tensor accelerator (STX) was designed by Fraunhofer IIS, ITWM and ETH Zürich, and the variable precision processor (VRP) by CEA LIST. These specialized accelerators are connected with very high-speed network on chip and SERDES technology from EXTOLL.

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