CPU design of the European Processor Initiative revealed

[Drama Lama]

The EU has their EPI which aims to make the EU less dependent from foreign chipmakers.

26 companies under the lead of French SiPearl  develop processors for HPC, autonomes cars, military and critical infrastructure  with ARM and RISC-V architectures

 

 

Now a photo by the French politician Alexandra Dublanche  at the SiPearl headquarters near Paris revealed a 72 core ARM cpu design that is estimated to be produced in TSMC 7nm lithography and use ARM Neoverse „ Zeuss „ cores and they told that also RISC-V tech is used.

( similar to Cortex A 77 )

Spoiler

 

Originally it was rumored that the first generation of Rhea processors would be made as general purpose cpus with TSMC 6nm lithography and ARM and released in 2021 

Quote

We can detail 72 CPU cores and 68 mesh network L3 cache slices in the floor plan, surrounded by various IP whose labels are too small to be legible. SiPearl had previously confirmed that the project uses Arm’s upcoming Neoverse “Zeus” cores which succeed the Neoverse N1 Ares cores that are being used in current generation Arm server SoC designs such as Amazon’s Graviton2 or Ampere’s Altra.

Beyond the confirmation of a core-count, we also see that the Rhea design sports a high-end memory subsystem, with the floor plan labelled as having 4x HBM2E controllers and 4-6 DDR5 controllers. Such a hybrid memory system would allow for extremely high bandwidth to be able to feed such a large number of cores, while still falling back to regular DIMMs to be able to scale in memory capacity.

 

 

My thoughts:

 

it‘s interesting to see states pushing open cpu designs when others want their own proprietary tech with backdoors

but in my opinion there’s a problem in the whole initiative 

the EU has no sub 14 nm fabs and that one 14 nm fab is owned by intel 

so the  most modern one is actually global foundries with 22nm and that is owned by UAE 

so not really „ independent „ chipmaking

 

 

 

Sources:

https://www.heise.de/news/EPI-Rhea-HPC-Europa-Prozessor-mit-72-ARM-Kernen-4888679.html

( article that I first read ( German )

 

https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Digitale-Souveraenitaet-bei-Prozessoren-4876945.html

( Information about EPI )

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16072/sipearl-lets-rhea-design-leak-72x-zeus-cores-4x-hbm2e-46-ddr5

 

Twitter Post:

https://mobile.twitter.com/ADublanche/status/1303273357069225985?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1303273357069225985|twgr^share_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.anandtech.com%2Fshow%2F16072%2Fsipearl-lets-rhea-design-leak-72x-zeus-cores-4x-hbm2e-46-ddr5

 

 

 

this is my one of my first tech news posts so 

 

please correct me if there is something wrong or if you have any suggestions 

Because it can help me improve in the future 

 

thanks

Edited September 9, 2020 by Drama Lama
Added a photo

[pythonmegapixel]

3 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

please correct me if there is something wrong or if you have any suggestions 

Because it can help me improve in the future

I think you have to add some actual input of your own (i.e. your personal opinion on the subject). It would also help if you could remove the spurious blank lines (which, to be fair, might be accidentally caused by copy and paste)

[Drama Lama]

12 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

I think you have to add some actual input of your own (i.e. your personal opinion on the subject). It would also help if you could remove the spurious blank lines (which, to be fair, might be accidentally caused by copy and paste)

Thanks. Is it now better?

Edited September 9, 2020 by Drama Lama

[Jurrunio]

not made by EU companies and ARM is also not an EU thing. Sounds more like Raspberry Pi with a big dream

[Bombastinator]

So an IoT risc chip.  72 cores is a lot though. I’m only counting 60 max on that pinned up paper pictured on the wall, but that’s still a lot.  If they’re doing core doubling stupidity like AMD did with bulldozer that still leaves 24 cores which is still a lot. There are IoT chips that make do with one core.  Leaves a lot of room to perform Hackery on spare cores. Are they really really simple cores or something?

[Drama Lama]

1 minute ago, Jurrunio said:

not made by EU companies and ARM is also not an EU thing. Sounds more like Raspberry Pi with a big dream

They want to build a supercomputer 

( don’t know if they want to use this exact cpu)

[Lord Vile]

EU: We want to be less dependant on foreign chip makers!

 

 

*Made in Taiwan

[schwellmo92]

21 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

EU: We want to be less dependant on foreign chip makers!

 

 

*Made in Taiwan

*IP purchased from UK

[Drama Lama]

7 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

*IP purchased from UK

that is owned by an Japanese company 

 

IP from a foundation based in Switzerland 

[LAwLz]

9 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

not made by EU companies and ARM is also not an EU thing. Sounds more like Raspberry Pi with a big dream

Depends on what you classify as "EU made".

SiPearl, the company that designed the chip, is European (French to be more precise).

It will be manufactured by a Taiwanese company (TSMC) but the machines TSMC uses are from a Dutch company called ASML.

The architecture used in the CPU cores is from ARM, which is a British company (ARM Holding) which for the last 4 years have been owned by a Japanese company (SoftBank).

 

It's hard to classify any product as "made by a X company" if you don't allow some part of the manufacturing or design to be done by a company from another country.

[Drama Lama]

I‘m still interested in the outcome 

 

maybe in two decades you‘ll buy your powerful cpu by Bosch

( probably not )

[Drama Lama]

11 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

architecture used in the CPU cores is from ARM,

Right but

 they plan also to use RISC-V

 

[DuckDodgers]

Russia is actually much more ahead in the "homegrown" CPU designs. Their E2K processors are build upon a native ISA (VLIW machine architecture) with an x86 emulation layer, produced in their own fabs. Of course, it is meant mostly for government and academic institutions, so market competition is not the scope of the design.

[Drama Lama]

6 minutes ago, DuckDodgers said:

produced in their own fabs.

Nope

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15823/russias-elbrus-8cb-microarchitecture-8core-vliw-on-tsmc-28nm/

[williamcll]

Aren't like a lot of Taiwanese fabs got their machines from EU?

[Drama Lama]

28 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Aren't like a lot of Taiwanese fabs got their machines from EU?

I think you are taking about Dutch company ASML

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Drama Lama said:

I think you are taking about Dutch company ASML

Is this Dutch company capable of doing the kind of work done at the Asian fans with their machines?

[Drama Lama]

10 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Is this Dutch company capable of doing the kind of work done at the Asian fans with their machines?

Of course not 

and can they make their lasers and lenses on their own?

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

Of course not 

and can they make their lasers and lenses on their own?

Dutch company’s days are numbered then. 

[Doobeedoo]

Heh, so just design ARM based and manufacture on others fabs. For a moment I dreamed actual new owned EU fab with maybe x86-64 heh... Yeah I know... 

[Drama Lama]

3 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

x86-64

Owned by Intel 

 

and licensed to AMD and Via 

( other license holders have lost their license or were bought by these three )

Edited September 10, 2020 by Drama Lama

[Doobeedoo]

16 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

Owned by Intel 

 

and licensed to AMD and Via 

( other license holders have lost their license or were bought by these three )

Yeah on CPU front it's complicated I know. Though seeing another ARM derivative isn't a exciting. On GPU side it's like anyone can try to go for it without so many license and patent headaches. 

[Mihle]

2 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

Owned by Intel 

 

and licensed to AMD and Via 

( other license holders have lost their license or were bought by these three )

This is not correct.
x86-64 is owned by AMD and licenced to Intel and Via.

While just x86 was created by Intel and licenced to AMD and Via and others, not sure if the patents on that have run out yet or not tho.