Thunderbird packs up to 6,144 CPU cores into a single AI accelerator and scales up to 360,000 cores — InspireSemi's RISC-V 'supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip' touts higher performance than Nvidia GPUs

The Holy Grail of supercomputing chip design is an architecture that combines the versatility and programmability of CPUs with the explicit parallelism of GPUs, and InspireSemi strives to achieve just that. InspireSemi's Thunderbird 'supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip' packs 1,536 RISC-V cores designed specifically for high-performance computing, but it also supports a general-purpose CPU programming model. It also has incredible scalability — four chips can be placed on a single accelerator card, which comes in a standard GPU-like form factor (AIC), bringing the total of cores per card up to 6,144, with extended scalability to 360,000 cores per cluster. 

InspireSemi's Thunderbird processor packs 1,536 custom 64-bit superscalar RISC-V cores with plenty of high-performance SRAM, accelerators for several cryptography algorithms, and an on-chip low-latency mesh fabric for inter- and intra-chip connectivity. The chip also supports LPDDR memory, NVMe storage, PCIe, and GbE connectivity. It has been taped out and will be fabbed at TSMC, then packaged at ASE. 

InspireSemi aims to install four Thunderbird chips onto a single board to offer developers 6,144 RISC-V cores. The current Thunderbird architecture supports scale-out capability to up to 256 processors connected using high-speed serial transceivers.  

When it comes to performance, InspireSemi says that its solution offers up to 24 FP64 TFLOPS at 50 GFLOPS/W (at 480W), which is a formidable performance. To put this into context, Nvidia's A100 delivers 19.5 FP64 TFLOPS, whereas Nvidia's H100 reaches 67 FP64 TFLOPS. It's unclear if we are dealing with the performance of a single-chip Thunderbird card or a 4-way model. Delivering 1920W to an add-in card is hardly possible, so it is likely that we are dealing with four Thunderbird processors on a card that can offer 24 FP64 TFLOPS per chip. 

The superscalar cores support vector tensor operations and mixed-precision floating point data formats, though there is no word that these cores are Linux-capable, which is why InspireSemi calls Thunderbird an accelerator rather than a general-purpose processor. Still, this processor can be programmed like a regular RISC-V CPU and supports a variety of workloads, such as AI, HPC, graph analytics, blockchain, and other compute-intensive applications. As a result, InspireSemi's customers will not have to use proprietary tools or software stacks like Nvidia's CUDA. The only question is whether industry-standard tools and software stacks will be enough to extract maximum performance from the Thunderbird I in all kinds of workloads. 

"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," said Ron Van Dell, CEO of InspireSemi. "We expect to begin customer deliveries in the fourth quarter." 

Speaking of customers and partners, InspireSemi has a long list of companies it works with, including Lenovo, Penguin Computing, 2CRSI, World Wide Computing, GigaIO, Cadence, and GUC, just to name a few. 

"This is a major milestone for our company and an exciting time to be bringing this versatile accelerated computing solution to market," said Alex Gray, Founder, CTO, and President of InspireSemi. "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."