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posted by hubie on Friday June 03 2022, @04:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the riscy-business dept.

From Tom's Hardware:

Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) said they would invest €400 million (around $426 million) in a laboratory that will develop RISC-V-based processors that could be used to build zettascale supercomputers. However, the lab will not focus solely on CPUs for next-generation supercomputers but also on processor uses for artificial intelligence applications and autonomous vehicles.

The research laboratory will presumably be set up in Barcelona, Spain, and will receive €400 million from Intel and the Spanish Government over 10 years. The fundamental purpose of the joint research laboratory is to develop chips based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) that could be used for a wide range of applications, including AI accelerators, autonomous vehicles, and high-performance computing.

The creation of the joint laboratory does not automatically mean that Intel will use RISC-V-based CPUs developed in the lab for its first-generation zettascale supercomputing platform but rather indicates that the company is willing to make additional investments in RISC-V. After all, last year, Intel tried to buy SiFive, a leading developer of RISC-V CPUs and is among the top sponsors of RISC-V International, a non-profit organization supporting the ISA.

[....] throughout its history, Intel invested hundreds of millions in non-x86 architectures (including RISC-based i960/i860 designs in the 1980s, Arm in the 2000s, and VLIW-based IA64/Itanium in the 1990s and the 2000s). Eventually, those architectures were dropped, but technologies developed for them found their way into x86 offerings.

I would observe that a simple well designed instruction set could require less silicon. Possibly more cores per chip using same fabrication technology. Or more speculative execution branch prediction using up some of that silicon. I would mention compiler back ends, but that is a subject best not discussed in public.


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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday June 06 2022, @02:34PM

    by Freeman (732) on Monday June 06 2022, @02:34PM (#1250969) Journal

    The reason why x86, x86-64 and Windows specifically have thrived is that they were more open to use. Apple enjoyed some early adoptions, but quickly fell behind Microsoft. Due to the fact that Apple wanted to control everything. While Microsoft let you do whatever. That's led to serious security nightmares and troubles, but Windows is the dominant desktop operating system. The more difficult and expensive you make something, the less adoption you will get.

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