Semidynamics announces fully customisable, 4-way, Atrevido 423 RISC-V core for big data applications

Semidynamics, the only provider of fully customisable RISC-V processor IP, has launched the next member of its Atrevido family of 64-bit cores. The Atrevido 423 has a wider, 4-way pipeline, allowing for the decoding and retirement of up to two times more instructions than its recently launched, 2-way, 223 core. It is also coupled with more functional units, which significantly increases the IPC (instructions-per-cycle).

Roger Espasa, Semidynamics’ CEO, said, “The Atrevido 423 is particularly well suited for applications that require massive amounts of data. It shines when the data required cannot fit in memory hierarchy levels that are closer to the core (such as L1, L2 or even L3) by tolerating very large latencies without compromising on throughput thanks to our Gazzillion™ misses technology. This can handle up to 128 simultaneous requests for data and track them back to the correct place in whatever order they are returned. Gazzillion™ allows the core to access memory hierarchy levels far away from the core without an impact in bandwidth or throughput. Effectively, Gazzillion™ technology removes the latency issues that can occur when using CXL technology to enable far away memory to be accessed at the supercharged rates that it was designed to deliver. This makes Atrevido very well positioned to handle AI and HPC workloads, which typically need to rapidly access very large amounts of data from main memory.”

Atrevido can be configured as a coherent core with a CHI NoC or as a simpler, incoherent core connected via an AXI interface. Furthermore, with an improved TLB and MMU and support for SV39/48/57, the core is well suited for running applications with large memory footprints using Linux. The Out-Of-Order core comes with a large menu of RISC-V extensions that can be added. Most notably, it can be configured with the in-house Vector Unit, which fully supports the latest RISC-V vector spec. Other important extensions are bit manipulation, crypto, single-precision FP, double-precision FP and half-precision FP, and bfloat16. Customers can also optionally choose to protect the Data cache with ECC and the Instruction cache with parity, if required for their target markets. Furthermore, the Atrevido core is fully compliant with the latest RVA22 RISC-V profile. The cores are process agnostic with versions already being supplied down to 5nm.

Roger Espasa added, “Semidynamics has the fastest cores on the market for moving large amounts of data with a cache line per clock at high frequencies even when the data does not fit in the cache. And this can be done at frequencies up to 2.4 GHz on the right node. The rest of the market averages about a cache line every many, many cycles, that is nowhere near Semidynamics’ one every cycle.”