The age of full-fledged RISC-V data center CPUs is nearly upon us, as Ventana's 192-core Veryon V2 is coming in 2024 (via ServeTheHome). Ventana, founded in 2018, claims the Veryon V2 edges ahead of AMD's Genoa and Bergamo Epyc CPUs. However, the company foresees much bigger victories down the line with its domain-specific accelerator (or DSA) chiplets, which Ventana forecasts will deliver large performance boosts compared to typical CPUs.
RISC-V is an open standard (previously open source) CPU architecture that has been used in many applications but is just now popping up in servers. The Veryon V2 will be Ventana's first server CPUs to market, as the Veryon V1 has seemingly been canceled and skipped over.
Compared to V1, V2 has more cores and cache per chiplet, the slightly newer 4nm node from TSMC instead of the 5nm node, and standard RISC-V RVA23 vector instructions, as Ventana originally planned on using its own instructions. However, Ventana wants its CPUs to follow RISC-V standards to improve hardware-software compatibility. To that end, it has also added RISC-V Software Ecosystem (or RISE) support to the V2.
The Veyron V2 takes a leaf out of AMD's server CPUs by using a chiplet design featuring an I/O hub chiplet and compute chiplets with CPU cores. However, Ventana also offers DSA chiplets that can accelerate specific workloads, and the company claims this will offer vastly higher performance than what is possible with a traditional CPU without hardware acceleration. Additionally, the I/O hub can also be customized with hardware acceleration, which AMD also doesn't offer.
Ventana claims its approach to CPU design in using chiplets and DSA hardware will reduce development time to less than a year and costs to less than $25 million, and that it would take twice as many x86 or ARM CPUs to match the Veryon V2. Take this all with a grain of salt, though, as Ventana's server CPU will arrive in 2024, and probably the latter half of 2024 at that, according to ServeTheHome.
