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Barcelona Supercomputing Center presents Sargantana: new open-source RISC-V chip
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- paulluuk 3y ago> The BSC, Europe's leading developer of open source computing technologies > The fact that the [..] architecture [..] of these new processors is open source, and therefore non-proprietary and accessible to all, reduces technological dependence on large multinational corporations I hadn't heard of either BSC nor Open Source Computing before. I'm curious though, are there a lot of people out there who are not tied to large corporations and who have the knowledge and the means to produce computer hardware? Are there hobbyists out there producing their own custom chips and graphics cards?
- alfonsodev 3y agoI don’t know about hobbyists but there are less known companies doing open source hardware for sure, [1] here is an example of cool stackable parallel computing project. I participated on the campaign and received mine, but not sure how are they doing today, it was a while ago. Edit: Andreas Olofsson the original founder seems to be still active in the field [2] - [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-s... - [2] https://x.com/zeroasic?s=21&t=xSlFhUGn5i8d8RkXrsgAIg https://x.com/zeroasic?s=21&t=xSlFhUGn5i8d8RkXrsgAIg
- tecleandor 3y agoThe BSC has been featured a bunch of times around here due to their Marenostrum Supercomputer. A month ago someone posted a virtual visit to their Marenostrum 4 location, that's kinda surprising/interesting because is located inside an old chapel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38160675 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MareNostrum_4_supercomputer_at_Barcelona_Supercomputing_Center_1_br.jpg Their Marenostrum 5 is number 8 in the TOP 500 supercomputer list ( https://www.top500.org/system/180238/ https://www.top500.org/system/180238/ ) and I think it recently started working or it's about to do it now ( https://www.eetimes.com/bsc-about-to-dispatch-marenostrum-5-for-critical-research/ https://www.eetimes.com/bsc-about-to-dispatch-marenostrum-5-... ) . They had to change its location as it didn't fit in the church anymore, though.
- ciberado 3y agoBut they will keep the Marenostrum 4 in the chapel this time, instead of replacing the old generation with the new version :).
- tecleandor 3y agoNice! The real Computing Church!
- malwrar 3y agoIf anyone likes ambient music, an artist I like produced an album from recordings of marenostrum: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1EGmWY91Vus https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1EGmWY91Vus I find it oddly relaxing.
- rwmj 3y agoThey co-hosted the RISC-V Summit back in 2018: https://riscv.org/proceedings/2018/05/risc-v-workshop-in-barcelona-proceedings/ https://riscv.org/proceedings/2018/05/risc-v-workshop-in-bar...
- kinow 3y agoFor anyone who hasn't heard about the BSC, you can check out the website or, if you are more inclined to read code: - https://earth.bsc.es/gitlab/es/autosubmit/ https://earth.bsc.es/gitlab/es/autosubmit/ - project I joined last year to work on, a workflow manager used in MareNostrum to run mainly (but not exclusively) climate experiments - https://earth.bsc.es/gitlab/es/ https://earth.bsc.es/gitlab/es/ - other projects from my department - https://gitlab.bsc.es/explore/projects https://gitlab.bsc.es/explore/projects - general projects There are also lots of interesting projects, like Aina, a project in partnership with Generalitat de Catalunya (like the council? prefecture?) to foster the Catalan language with models and tools using HPC resources: https://projecteaina.cat/ https://projecteaina.cat/
- MoSattler 3y agohttps://archive.ph/TDj5W https://archive.ph/TDj5W
- Y_Y 3y agoFor those of you who don't speak Catalan, "sargantana" is a common little local lizard (Podarcis hispanicus, "Iberian wall lizard"). Of course the chip family (Lagarto) just means "lizard" in Castilian.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iamsaitam 3y ago(bonus).. and lagarto is the same in Portuguese as well
- germandiago 3y agoWarning, offtopic but funny: FWIW "lagarta" in spanish slang is a girl with a lot of ambition looking from things from men taking advantage of them. Not a "worker" but a dangerous person. Lol
- MoSattler 3y agosame in aragonese
- znpy 3y agoI don't know, I'm not a lizard expert but that lizard looks the same as the ones I saw when I was a kid in the south of Italy. I guess if I ever start a chip fab there I'm gonna call my chip stranvicula or something like that.
- Anduia 3y agoThey are very similar. The Iberian ones are smaller, with broader heads, and are sometimes more colorful. I'm pretty sure that a Catalan would call the Italian ones 'sargantana'.
- vlugorilla 3y agoSpanish, castilian does not exist
- ansible 3y agoHere's a pre-print paper I found: Sargantana: A 1 GHz+ In-Order RISC-V Processor with SIMD Vector Extensions in 22nm FD-SOI https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sargantana_preprint.pdf https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sarga... RV64GC with a subset of the v0.7.1 vector extension. 1.26GHz nominal clock on a 22nm process.
- DeathArrow 3y ago>22nm FD-SOI That's kind of not good news. I was hoping for 4nm to have some alterative to Intel/AMD/Apple.
- imiric 3y agoIt's unrealistic to expect these chips to compete with modern manufacturing standards. Still, it's very impressive the progress RISC-V has made in the last few years. It's actually a viable option for many projects now.
- bibanez 3y agoGuess what you need to develop 4nm (spoiler, it’s a lot of money). There are many applications where 22nm is a good tradeoff.
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- rwmj 3y agoYou don't do your first experimental test chips on 4nm. That's where you get to when you have raised hundreds of millions after you've gone through several iterations to prove to investors you know what you're doing.
- stefs 3y agoi guess this chip is not for high end gaming machines or servers, but rather cars, industrial machine controlling, smart fridges, that kind of stuff. during covid production of many appliances ground to a halt because of various chip shortages. now what if for some reason asian chips became unavailable in europe (wars, natural catastrophes, ...)? cheap and easy to build is far more important than high end performance here.
- DeathArrow 3y agoAny benchmarks? Does it compares to Intel/AMD at raw power? Does it compares with Apple at efficiency?
- sylware 3y agoIt is in an in-order CPU. It is meant for tasks where prediction and robustness are important. More like hard-ish realtime stuff in nasty environment (or... security? ahem...) RISC-V moving forward. Good.
- tecleandor 3y agoInteresting. It'd be nice to know if they're going to focus on HPC loads or hobby/consumer too. I should check to see if I still know people around the BSC :P
- _fcs 3y agoFrom the preprint [1] it looks like it is not meant for consumers. This way, Sargantana lays the foundations for future RISC-V based core designs able to meet industrial-class performance requirements for scientific, real-time, and high-performance computing applications. 1. <https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sargantana_preprint.pdf https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sarga...>
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoI would love to see a clear roadmap from the EU (not been successful searching) My take on this is 1. this is less about competitiveness at the cutting edge and more about security and economic on-shoring 2. building chips on-shore at the 40-20nm level massively reduces risk, increases the likelihood smaller states can build locally and solves for most chip needs 3. chips we need are rarely the cutting edge AI stuff. The vast volume of chios will go in as controllers on screens, USB connectors and so on. Building plug and play alternatives will give local manufacturers choices, and incentives will help. 4. the big win is security. Does the CEO of sensitive company, the head of security services and the general in charge of procurement use keyboards, cpus motherboards and monitors made from open source chips manufactured in a trusted nation? What is the BOM for the challenger tank - how many chips in there that are made by whom and ... the process is long and arduous and the risks are huge. But we make tanks from steel other materials made in "favoured nations" - surely the same applies to silicon?
- Gravityloss 3y agoThere are projects like Helios: Highly Efficient and Lightweight Input/output Open Silicon https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/190183836 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/190183836 But AFAIK this is just a small part of large amount of multiple projects.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoA lot of EU semi research goes on at IMEC in Belgium, but EU still lacks the actual means of put any of it into production on their own soil. EU fabs have given up going beyond 12nm as it was deemed too capital intensive.
- Gravityloss 3y agoThanks! I was somewhat expecting someone to actually drop into this thread to put links to many 100 million level programs... :)
- ksec 3y ago
- rwmj 3y agoIs this based off CVA6? That's not mentioned.
- m00dy 3y agoI am one of the fortunate people who could afford to pay a visit to BSC.
- capableweb 3y agoSince when does it cost money? I'm fairly sure it used to be free to visit...
- kh_hk 3y agoMust be poor phrasing and choice of words I guess. I concur it's free to visit.
- lsllc 3y ago"to pay a visit" doesn't mean it costs money, it's a fairly natural turn of phrase: "I paid a visit to the library yesterday". I wouldn't call it poor phrasing or even a poor choice (although I could see confusion for non-native English speakers). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pay%20a%20visit%20to https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pay%20a%20visit%2...
- m00dy 3y ago:-)
- manuelabeledo 3y agoIt technically does, if you don't live there.
- kinow 3y agoIt still is. You can just book it with reception directly, or if you attend a meeting or conference. Whenever I get friends in Barcelona I always invite them over too (anyone that works there can request a visitor badge and schedule the visit -- necessary avoid conflicts).
- cmrx64 3y agoWhat about this chip is open source? As far as I can tell, nothing. It frustrates me to no end that closed, secret efforts inherit the “open source” branding just because the specification they implement is participatory and royalty free.
- ThePituLegend 3y agoIn fact, you can get the RTL here: https://github.com/bsc-loca/sargantana https://github.com/bsc-loca/sargantana :D
- cmrx64 3y ago!!! perfect, thank you. I’m annoyed now at myself for not having found it…
- gchadwick 3y agoIt's a cool project but I do wish these open source processor initiatives targetted more realistic design points. In particular there's often a desire to push out of order design into the micro-architecture where the resulting performance just doesn't justify it. In this they're achieving a CoreMark/MHz of 2.44 (from the paper here: https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sargantana_preprint.pdf https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sarga...). This is very low performance (on a par with the Arm M0+). Now CoreMark certainly isn't the be all and end all of Benchmarks. In particular it has very little relevance to high performance compute or application cores in general. However it's a useful performance smoke test. It is easy to perform well e.g getting close to 1.0 IPC for a single issue design such as Sargantana, CoreMark doesn't really stress the memory system so a major source of stalls that you need to hide latency for just isn't there. So if you're not hitting that you've definitely got work to do on the microarchitecture. They may well have been better off trying to build something simpler and putting more design time into improving the performance of the basic microarchitecture. The other crucial aspect that's often overlooked is verification. This is a major part of producing a new production quality CPU design and it doesn't appear to be discussed in the paper at all. Maybe once they've released the RTL they'll also release the testbench so you can see what they have done.
- gchadwick 3y agoThough on the CoreMark benchmark they haven't published the IPC achieved. You get a large swing in results depending upon the compiler used and switches (For RV32 at least I've found GCC out-performs LLVM comfortably). They do have an IPC number for Dhrystone (another tiny benchmark that tells you little about real-world performance but you should be able to perform well on), that looks to be 0.7.
- phkahler 3y agoAny of these efforts not performing as well as BOOM may be suffering from "not invented here". Its already there and getting good IPC. Why not start from that.
- cf1241290841 3y agoI believe we might be at the point where supply chain security (and code base security) might warrant the question why you cant implement something on an M0+. If you really need higher speeds for reaction time, use an ASIC or FPGA. We already do this with USB3 or Ethernet controllers.
- pantulis 3y agoUnrelated note: BSC is a location in the unapologetically crazy HBO series "30 coins" season 2, some cool sequences there involving a group visit.
- dtjb 3y agoAs far as data centers go, it's beautiful. Like something you'd see in a Mission Impossible heist. https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=oj5FSKsTt7o https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=oj5FSKsTt7o
- ashvardanian 3y agoDoes anyone know a decent RISC-V developer kit that one can buy in the Bay Area today? Or rent somewhere in the cloud? I want to start porting our C libraries to RISC-V.
- LeonM 3y agoThere are plenty, SiFive and MilkV sell boards for example. You can also just run emulation.
- ashvardanian 3y agoThere are plenty that exist, but i haven’t heard of anyone using them or any stores selling them. Emulation isn’t enough. I need to benchmark the libraries. Emulation will add significant overhead.
- LeonM 3y ago> I need to benchmark the libraries. Emulation will add significant overhead. Do not expect good performance from RISC-V processors at the moment. Emulation on a modern X86 CPU will outperform any commercial available RISC-V processor at the moment.
- camel-cdr 3y agoThis isn't true in my experiance, especially when dealing with the vector extension. But emulation doesn't offer any usefull performance insights anyways, except for maybe dynamic instruction count.
- brucehoult 3y ago> Emulation on a modern X86 CPU will outperform any commercial available RISC-V processor at the moment That's not true. qemu-user is a little faster than the single-issue HiFive Unleashed from 2008, but qemu-system is slower. Against either the dual-issue U74 cores in the JH7110 or the small OoO cores in the TH1520 and SG2042 qemu doesn't sand a chance on a core for core basis. It used to be the case that qemu could win on x86 by throwing more cores at the problem, but with the 64 core SG2042 in the Milk-V Pioneer that possibility has disappeared too -- not to mention that the Pioneer is $1500 for chip+motherboard (need to add RAM and storage), while a 64 core x86 is $5000 just for the chip.
- dataking 3y ago> The Barcelona Supercomputing Center [...] presented on Wednesday the new Sargantana chip, the third generation of open source processors designed entirely at the BSC. > Researchers from other universities and research centres such as the Centro de Investigación en Computación del Instituto Politécnico Nacional de México (CIC-IPN) [...] have participated in the development of Sargantana. So this was designed entirely in Spain but it is also joint work with a university in Mexico ;-) Nice project though; I've visited BSC and they do a lot of cool work there.
- 999900000999 3y agoVery cool, I just got a MangoPi and I'm excited to get some stuff running on it. I imagine RISC-V is the future. None wants to pay licensing fees to Arm
- mkehrt 3y agoSo, uh, why's it named after a demon?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- snvzz 3y agoIt is actually a common animal. https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac%C3%A8rtids#p-lang-btn https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac%C3%A8rtids#p-lang-btn
- mkehrt 3y agoAh, that makes sense. All the Google hits in English are a demon or a World of Warcraft enemy. Obviously I should have been looking in Catalan!
- cf1241290841 3y agoShout out to affordable subsidized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service Be it googles OpenMPW Free Silicon Chip Program https://developers.google.com/silicon https://developers.google.com/silicon (still active?) Or the EU subsidized multi project wafer https://europractice-ic.com/schedules-prices-2023/ https://europractice-ic.com/schedules-prices-2023/