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Recently, RISC-V startup Ventana Microsystems began to design and release its first global server-based processor — the Veyron V1 — utilizing advanced 5nm process technology. This new server processor would put the startup in direct competition with AMD and Intel with their server processors, EPYC and Xeon, respectively. This news comes from today's RISC-V Summit in San Jose, California.
Startup Ventana Microsystems is aiming to take AMD and Intel in the ring of server-side processors with its RISC-V chips, the Veyron V1
RISC-V architecture is predominantly used in the IoT, or Internet of Things marketplace, because of its ability to offer efficient energy use, open-source capability, cutting-edge instructions, and scalability of its hardware. It would make sense to branch out its technology on a larger scale, including servers and data centers, which are becoming a mainstay in today's society.
Veyron's new V1 chip offers a RISC-V core built on the 5nm process technology. The chip provides an eight-pipeline design, frequencies up to 3.6 GHz, and 16 cores per cluster, totaling 192 cores. The Veyron V1 chip also has an L3 cache of 48MB, can support "out-of-order execution," and has advanced security via sid-channel attack mitigations, IOMMU and AIA technologies, thorough RAS functionalities, and performance tuning via top-down software methodology.
The most crucial part of Veyron offering this chip to a larger market is the ability to have it used in more products and services. As you can see, Veyron hopes to utilize the V1 chip in many different server tasks for storage, web hosting, data centers, and streaming services.
The overall design of the chip has a similar layout structure as the new EPYC processors from AMD, with the data interfaces along one side of the chip, memory on each side, and the PCIe Gen5 (with backward compatibility with Gen4). The Die-to-Die (D2D) interface is compatible with Harness of Wire (HoW) and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), which are also supported by larger companies such as AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Arm, as well as many more.
Drew Henry, Executive VP of Strategy and Marketing at Arm, is welcome to see not only more competition in the ecosystem but also from fresh faces like Ventana Microsystems. He mentions that with the increasing need for hardware for HPC, cloud, AI, and more, more companies involved would help the market and not hinder it, allowing technology to flourish and not be halted due to a lack of supplies. Arm executives say, "We respect RISC-V, but it's not a competitor yet."
The new Veyron V1 is pushed to be used by more companies to accelerate the company's growth and manufacturing costs to produce more chips. The company is looking to shorten the development period by two years, saving upwards of $75 million in research and development alone.
