Inspire Semiconductor Holdings Inc., a chip design company that provides revolutionary high-performance, energy-efficient accelerated computing solutions for High Performance Computing (HPC), AI, graph analytics, and other compute-intensive workloads, is pleased to announce the successful tapeout of its Thunderbird I Accelerated Computing chip for fabrication at TSMC.

Thunderbird I is InspireSemi’s versatile “supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip”, an advanced SOC (System on Chip) that packs 1,536 64-bit custom RISC-V CPU cores on a single chip, tightly integrated with high-speed memory and low-latency networking. This versatile compute accelerator delivers unprecedented performance for a wide range of applications, with best-in-class energy efficiency and a disruptive price point.

Thunderbird leverages the established and open RISC-V CPU software ecosystem. Since most software is written for CPUs, it is much easier to support vs. requiring a complete re-architecting of software to run on GPUs, and which in many cases is not worth the effort or expense.

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Compared to a modern datacenter GPU, Thunderbird provides all the raw computational power with far broader application to real world HPC software applications and codes. It is also an ideal platform to accelerate large graph analytics workloads, which are used in important applications such as fraud detection, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, pharma clinical trials, and supply chain management.

The initial product will be an industry standard server PCIe add-in card with 4 Thunderbird devices, delivering >6,000 CPU cores that support double precision math (64-bit floating point, aka FP64) required for many important HPC applications.

Ron Van Dell, CEO of InspireSemi, said, “We are proud of the accomplishment of our engineering and operations team to finish the Thunderbird I design and submit it to our world-class supply chain partners, TSMC, ASE, and imec for production. We expect to begin customer deliveries in the fourth quarter.”

Alex Gray, Founder, CTO and President of InspireSemi, said, “This is a major milestone for our company and an exciting time to be bringing this versatile accelerated computing solution to market. Thunderbird accelerates many critical applications in important industries that other approaches do not, including life sciences, genomics, medical devices, climate change research, and applications that require deep simulation and modeling.”

SOURCE: GlobeNewsWire