InspireSemi is aiming to revolutionize supercomputing chip design with their Thunderbird ‘supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip’, which combines the versatility of CPUs with the parallelism of GPUs. The chip features 1,536 custom RISC-V cores, high-performance SRAM, accelerators for cryptography algorithms, and on-chip mesh structure for connectivity. It also supports LPDDR memory, NVMe storage, PCIe, and GbE connectivity. With plans to fit four Thunderbird chips on a single board, developers can access 6,144 RISC-V cores, with scalability up to 360,000 cores per cluster.
In terms of performance, Thunderbird offers up to 24 FP64 TFLOPS at 50 GFLOPS/W, surpassing Nvidia A100. It supports vector tensor operations and mixed-precision floating-point data formats, catering to AI, HPC, graph analytics, blockchain, and other compute-intensive applications. While Thunderbird is called an accelerator rather than a general-purpose processor, it supports various workloads without relying on proprietary tools like Nvidia CUDA.
InspireSemi’s CEO, Ron Van Dell, expressed pride in their engineering team’s accomplishment in completing the design of Thunderbird I and partnering with TSMC, ASE, and imec for production. Deliveries to customers are expected to begin in the fourth quarter. The company collaborates with industry giants like Lenovo, Penguin Computing, Cadence, and GUC, among others.
According to Alex Gray, InspireSemi’s Founder, CTO, and President, Thunderbird’s accelerated computing solution will impact industries like life sciences, genomics, medical devices, climate change research, and modeling and simulation. This innovation presents a significant milestone for the company and the market, offering a versatile solution for critical applications that previous approaches struggled to address.
Overall, InspireSemi’s Thunderbird chip represents a groundbreaking leap in supercomputing chip design, combining CPU versatility with GPU parallelism to deliver high-performance computing capabilities for a wide range of applications. With impressive scalability and performance metrics, Thunderbird promises to disrupt the industry and provide a competitive alternative to existing solutions like Nvidia’s offerings.
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