www.nextplatform.com, Jun. 14, 2021 –
There are some unique developments afoot at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), which stands to reason for the only HPC site to be housed in a former church.
The site will be home to the world's first RISC-V-based supercomputer, a collaboration underpinned by commercial RISC-V company, SiFive, whom we talked to last week (and which may be in Intel's acquisition sights). Another RISC-V company has entered the BSC, European Processor Initiative arena.
Cortus, a French semiconductor maker focused on embedded, low power processors, is also poised to stake a claim in the very early days of RISC-V in HPC, although they've not managed to get a manufacturable product in line before others who are slated for the RISC-V based BSC exascale system set to appear sometime before 2024, assuming funding holds.
Cortus will be building a complex out-of-order processor core for the European eProcessor project in conjunction with BSC. The company says they will be capable of showing outstanding performance and efficiency compared to x86 architectures with all the same scalability and full cache coherency.