Intel invests 2.8 billion to build research lab to develop RISC-V-based processors

IT House June 2 news, according to Tom’s Hardware report, this week, Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) said that they will invest 400 million euros (about 2.856 billion yuan) to build a laboratory,Development of RISC-V-based processors for zettascale supercomputers. However, the lab will not only focus on CPUs for next-generation supercomputers,There will also be a focus on AI applications and processor usage for autonomous vehicles.

Image from Intel

It is speculated that the research lab will be set up in Barcelona, ​​Spain, and will receive 400 million euros from Intel and the Spanish government over 10 years. The fundamental purpose of the joint research lab is to develop chips based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) that can be used in a wide range of applications, including artificial intelligence accelerators, autonomous vehicles and high-performance computing.

The establishment of the joint lab does not automatically mean that Intel will use the RISC-V-based CPUs developed in the lab for its first-generation zettascale supercomputing platform, but rather indicates that the company is willing to make additional investments in RISC-V. After all, last year Intel tried to acquire SiFive, a leading developer of RISC-V CPUs and one of the top sponsors of RISC-V International, a nonprofit that supports the ISA.

While about $21.3 million is a lot of money, Intel will spend more on its x86-based products over the next few years,So spending on RISC-V processors doesn’t mean less focus on x86 designs. Instead, throughout its history, Intel has invested hundreds of millions in non-x86 architectures (including RISC-based i960/i860 designs in the 1980s, Arm in the 2000s, and VLIW-based IA64 in the 1990s and 2000s) /Itanium). Eventually, these architectures were abandoned, but the technology developed for them was incorporated into x86 products.

IT House understands that by investing in RISC-V, Intel may kill several birds with one stone. First, Intel will be able to use it for its products, assuming that engineers at the joint labs manage to design a CPU technology better suited for a ZettaFLOPS-class supercomputer. In addition, Intel’s foundry services division will likely be the factory of choice for CPU/SoCs developed by the joint lab.

“High-performance computing is the key to solving the world’s most challenging problems, and we at Intel have an ambitious goal of sprinting toward the zettascale era of HPC,” said Jeff McVeigh, corporate vice president and general manager of the Supercomputing Group at Intel. Barcelona The Supercomputing Center shares our vision for this goal, with the same emphasis on sustainability and an open approach. We are excited to partner with them on this journey.”

Last year, Intel set itself an ambitious goal of building a ZettaFLOPS-class supercomputer platform by 2027, which would mean a 1,000-fold increase in supercomputer performance in about five years. The company said it will require new computing architectures, new system architectures, high-speed memory and I/O interfaces, novel manufacturing techniques and sophisticated chip packaging methods, among others. One of the ways the company is radically improving computing performance is by building an architecture that combines the company’s x86 general-purpose cores with Xe-HPC computing GPUs. The first product using this concept is the Falcon Shores architecture, which is currently in development.