The first European independent research and development CPU unveiled: RISC-V architecture, 22nm process, frequency 1GHz
In terms of processors, not only China and the United States have to independently research and develop, but Europe is unwilling to be constrained by others. Ten countries including France have jointly established the European Processor Initiative (EPI) to develop high-performance CPUs by themselves. Now EPI's first CPU prototype EPAC1.0 is here, using the RISC-V architecture and 22nm process.
The European EPI processor program has been underway for several years. One of the purposes is to develop its own processor for the EU's HPC supercomputing. However, the progress has been slow before, and the prototype EPAC1.0 has not been unveiled until now.
The EPAC1.0 processor uses a hybrid architecture. The CPU core is Avistado developed by SemiDynamics. It is based on the open source RISC-V architecture and has 4 cores. The VPU vector unit is built by the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (Spain) and the University of Zagreb. (Croatia) jointly developed.
Others include L2 cache, STX tensor accelerator, VRR variable precision calculation module and SerDes network module developed in France.
Judging from these units, the design of the EPAC1.0 processor is still very advanced, integrating many dedicated accelerators, but the actual performance has not been exposed.
The EPAC1.0 processor is manufactured using GF's 22nm process, with a core area of ​​only 27mm2, but the frequency is only 1GHz, which should be used for testing. The first batch of production is only 143, and the program has already run through.
The next-generation EPAC processor will upgrade the 12nm process and adopt an advanced chip layout.