InspireSemi's Thunderbird “supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip” packs up to 6,144 RISC-V cores on a single PCIe board

RISC-V is steadily gaining ground versus traditional X86 solutions. The adoption rate might not be that significant in the mainstream markets as of yet, with only a handful of RISC-V-based laptops and PC platforms available right now; however, the high performance computing and server sectors are starting to realize the potential of this alternative ISA. To help unlock the scalable compute power of the latest RISC-V technology, InspireSemi has announced the successful tapeout of its Thunderbird I “supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip” with 1,536 64-bit custom cores. The company plans to offer a PCIe board with up to four such chips in Q4 ‘24, as production ramps up at TSMC.

InspireSemi managed to pack more than 1,500 RISC-V cores on a single SoC roughly the same size of Nvidia’s current AD102 GPU chip. The scalable module also includes six high-speed memory chips (unspecified capacity, presumably HBM) and a low-latency mesh network that allows up to 4 of these modules (6,144 cores) to work in tandem on a dedicated PCIe card. It is unclear what PCIe standard is used, but keeping in mind that this is an HPC product, we are most likely looking at a PCIe 5.0 solution, which is already standard in most HPC configurations and eliminates the need for cumbersome RISC-V motherboards. Scalability goes beyond a single PCIe board with four chips, as a system can recognize up to 256 chips. Additionally, RISC-V comes with an open-source software ecosystem to facilitate faster migration. Pricing info has not yet been disclosed.

While GPUs are currently preferred over CPUs in the HPC environment due to their superior compute power, InspireSemi recommends the new Thunderbird chip as a more energy-efficient solution with “far broader application to real world HPC software.” The power of 6,144 RISC-V cores with support for double precision FP64 calculations can be harnessed to accelerate large graph analytics workloads used in fraud detection, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, pharma clinical trials, and supply chain management.

Of course, all the latest AI developments are supported with the RISC-V platform, as well. The list of applications is much wider, still. Alex Gray, CTO, founder and president of InpireSem explains that Thunderbird I could be useful for other fields such as life sciences, genomics, medical devices, and climate change research.