The European EPAC processor has its first test samples after booting Linux

The European EPAC processor has the first test samples and has moved on to the next stage of development. Organization European Processor Initiative (EPI) involving 28 partners from 10 countries followed up on the event earlier this year, when the FPGA development phase managed to boot Linux.

EPI wants to create a European processor in the first phase designed for supercomputers. This includes Europe’s response to China, the United States and Japan. EPI is part of the EuroHPC event, in which the old continent is building a network of supercomputers. One of them runs in Ostrava.

EPI is developing the European Processor Accelerator (EPAC), which uses the open RISC-V standard, an alternative to ARM. EPI received 143 EPAC test chips manufactured by GlobalFoundries, a former part of AMD. 22FDX technology was used, so it is a 22nm process.

These chips have an area of ​​26.97 square millimeters. It targets the 1 GHz frequency. It includes four VPU SemiDynamics (Avispado RISC-V cores) and a larger VPU designed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the University of Zagreb.

There are two other smaller cores. Stenci and Tensor Accelerator (STX) was designed by Fraunhofer IIS, ITWM and ETH Zürich. The Variable Precision Processor (VRP) is from CEA LIST. All chips are connected by a high-speed Network on Chip (NoC) interface SERDESS and EXTOLL.

EPI includes companies such as Infineon, STMicroelectronics or BMW. There are also several universities. The Czech consortium Codasip, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IT4Innovations also applied for the development of the European processor. but the project did not get.

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