Fully Customisable Vector Unit for RISC-V Implementations
11 June 2023
Capable of delivering up to 2048b of computation per cycle, the new Vector Unit from Semidynamics is a completely customisable platform that accompanies the company’s 64-bit RISC-V core offering.
It is compliant with the RISC-V Vector Specification 1.0 and boasts numerous additional customisable features that result in access to enhanced data handling capabilities. The Vector Unit comprises several 'vector cores' (either 4, 8, 16 or 32 cores) - which are roughly equivalent to a graphics processing unit (GPU) core. They perform multiple calculations in parallel, with each vector core having arithmetic units that take care of addition, subtraction, fused multiply-add, division, square root and logic operations. Each vector core can be tailored to support different data types - FP64, FP32, FP16, BF16, INT64, INT32, INT16 or INT8, depending on the customer’s target application domain.
“This unleashes the ability for the Vector Unit to process unprecedented amounts of data bits,” states Semidynamics’ CEO Roger Espasa. “And to fetch all this data from memory, we have our Gazzillion technology that can handle up to 128 simultaneous requests for data and track them back to the correct place in whatever order they are returned. Together our technologies take RISC-V to a whole new level with the fastest handling of big data currently available that will open up opportunities in many application areas of High-Performance Computing such as video processing, AI and ML.”
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