Thunderbird packs up to 6,144 CPU cores into a single AI accelerator and scales up to 360,000 cores — InspireSemi's RISC-V 'supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip' touts higher performance than Nvidia GPUs

InspireSemi's Thunderbird.

The Holy Grail of supercomputing chip design is an architecture that combines the versatility and programmability of CPUs with the explicit parallelism of GPUs, and InspireSemi strives to achieve just that. InspireSemi's Thunderbird 'supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip' packs 1,536 RISC-V cores designed specifically for high-performance computing, but it also supports a general-purpose CPU programming model. It also has incredible scalability — four chips can be placed on a single accelerator card, which comes in a standard GPU-like form factor (AIC), bringing the total of cores per card up to 6,144, with extended scalability to 360,000 cores per cluster. 

InspireSemi's Thunderbird processor packs 1,536 custom 64-bit superscalar RISC-V cores with plenty of high-performance SRAM, accelerators for several cryptography algorithms, and an on-chip low-latency mesh fabric for inter- and intra-chip connectivity. The chip also supports LPDDR memory, NVMe storage, PCIe, and GbE connectivity. It has been taped out and will be fabbed at TSMC, then packaged at ASE.