Esperanto ET-SoC-1

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• Processor
• CPU

2021: Presentation ET-SoC-1

Esperanto, founded by Dave Dietzel, on August 25, 2021 introduced a ET-SoC-1 processor with more than 1 thousand RISC-V cores. The chip, christened by the creators of the "supercomputer on a chip," is primarily designed for specific loads in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but, according to the developers, it will cope with any other server tasks.

Six Esperanto processors ET-SoC-1 in the OCP Glacier Point v2 extension module < br/> Photo source: servethehome.com

Esperanto emphasizes that their "supercomputer on a chip" is suitable for any kind of workload, and not just for accelerating AI due to the presence of general-purpose cores.

The processor power level, according to developers, averages 20 watts, but depending on the load, it can vary from 10 to 60 watts.

Esperanto ET-SoC-1 is produced on the basis of capacities the Taiwan TSMC using a 7-nanometer process.

Basic facts about ET-SoC-1 < br/> Photo source: servethehome.com

At the end of 2021, Esperanto plans to launch an early access program in which customers will have the opportunity to test ET-SoC-1.

Chip features ET-SoC-1

On a chip with an area of ​ ​ 570 mm2 (with a package size of 45x45 mm), the creators placed 24 billion transistors. In particular, they form two clusters of cores - ET-Minion and ET-Maxion - and one service processor. The chip has 1088 "small" energy-efficient ET-Minion castom cores, which are designed to work in parallel mode. In addition to them, developers provide four "large" high-performance ET-Maxion cores. Cluster of "small" cores, used when executing in-order execution, "large" - for out-of-order execution.

Each core of ET-Minion is equipped with its own block of vector and tensor operations that help in solving problems in the field of artificial intelligence (in particular, in the work of advisory systems based on machine learning), and also support simultaneous threading (SMT, Simultane multithreading). The operating frequency of 64-bit RISC-V cores of ET-Minion lies in the range of 0.3-2 GHz.

Universal ET-Maxion cores "understand" RISC-V RV64GC instructions and can work independently of the array of "small" cores in the range from 0.5-2 GHz.

In addition to the 1093 RISC-V cores, the Esperanto ET-SoC-1 chip carries 160 MB of SRAM memory, the amount of which is distributed between the cache of the first and second layers, as well as superoperative (scratchpad) memory. Support for PCIe x8 Gen4 interface, four LPDDR4x memory channels and secure download^[1].

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