432-Core Chiplet-Based RISC-V Chip Nearly Ready to Blast Into Space

[erek]

Loving RISC-V

"Meanwhile, one of the advantages of chiplet designs is that ESA and its partners from ETH Zürich and the University of Bologna can add other chiplets to the package to accelerate certain workloads if needed.


The Occamy CPU is developed as a part of the EuPilot program, and it is one of many chips that the ESA is considering for spaceflight computing. However, there are no guarantees that the process will indeed be used onboard spaceships.

The Occamy design aims to support high-performance and AI workloads through a bare-metal runtime, but it is not yet clear whether the runtime will be at a container level or at the bare-metal level. The Occamy processor can be emulated on FPGAs. The implementation has been tested on two AMD Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ HBM FPGAs and the Virtex UltraScale+ VCU1525 FPGA."

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/432-core-occamy-cpu-for-use-in-space-tapes-out

 

[Lakados]

given age and limitations of the RAD5500 this looks to be a significant step up.

 

[erek]

given age and limitations of the RAD5500 this looks to be a significant step up.

agreed
it'd be awesome to collect a RAD750

"The RAD750 system has a price that is comparable to the RAD6000, the latter of which as of 2002 was listed at US$200,000 (equivalent to $301,314 in 2021). Customer program requirements and quantities, however, greatly affect the final unit costs."

 

[cdabc123]

They dont have any produced asics. At this point there are already rad hardened fpgas that can handle various soft processors. The tested options were not. So what is the point of this? A cool soft processor?

It looks like they just scaled many small risc cores on a regular fpga. Not producing anything of value.

 

[serpretetsky]

They dont have any produced asics. At this point there are already rad hardened fpgas that can handle various soft processors. The tested options were not. So what is the point of this? A cool soft processor?

It looks like they just scaled many small risc cores on a regular fpga. Not producing anything of value.

it says they taped out, so probably awaiting the chip. seems like a custom designed rad hardened soc (including the riscv cores, named snitch) for low power number crunching on a silicon interposer with hbm2e.

the fpga test was done across 3 fairly large ultrascale+ FPGAs. probably not ideal (and i dont know if there are rad hardened versions of those chips)

 

[Lakados]

They dont have any produced asics. At this point there are already rad hardened fpgas that can handle various soft processors. The tested options were not. So what is the point of this? A cool soft processor?

It looks like they just scaled many small risc cores on a regular fpga. Not producing anything of value.

Xilinx does for sure produce rad hardened FPGA's (Kintex UltraScale XQRKU060) and they are like a cool million each, and they get paired with the RAD series PowerPC processors which are clocking in at a quarter million each. I would think that any competition in that arena is ultimately a good thing, and a lot of times you just need a shit load of cores, some times you just want the ability to process 400 tiny workloads simultaneously on 400 tiny cores rather than 1 big ass core processing them in sequence. I could see these potentially being a pretty big deal in future generations of communication satellites.