4 ms·

Microchip releases PIC64 radiation tolerant RISC-V CPUs for space applications

18 points by fork-bomber 2y ago

brucehoult 2y ago
Note that this is only one of two new lines of chips announced by Microchip under the "PIC64" name. PIC was of course originally a proprietary 8 bit ISA designed for use in intelligent but low cost peripherals in the 1970s. PIC32 was a line of MIPS-based chips, but a couple of years ago they added 32 bit Arm Cortex-M cores to the line-up. This radiation tolerant chip uses eight quite new SiFive X280 RISC-V cores (announced April 2021) which are dual-issue in-order with large 512 bit vector unit. The other is the PIC64GX series, which uses four SiFive U54 64 bit single-issue Linux-capable RV64GC cores plus one E51 64 bit RV64IMAC real-time/controller core, all running at 625 MHz. There is no vector capability. Perhaps the best way to think of this chip is as a PolarFire SoC FPGA without the FPGA :-) They are advertised as being pin-compatible. https://static.dev.sifive.com/U54-MC-RVCoreIP.pdf https://static.dev.sifive.com/U54-MC-RVCoreIP.pdf These seem to be close to shipping, but you can't order just yet. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64gx https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/CURIOSITY-PIC64GX1000-KIT-ES https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/CURIOSITY-P...
- thrtythreeforty 2y ago
  I get the feeling these won't be cheap. Do you know of any other X280 cores available for mortals to buy? The only other microcontroller core I know of with a vector unit 512 or wider is the Xtensa Vision series, which is typically only shipped embedded in ASICs.
  - camel-cdr 2y ago
    There is currently no SBC available with those cores, but there is one announced to be released in 2024 Q4: https://milkv.io/chips/sg2380 https://milkv.io/chips/sg2380 (see also this forum thread: https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-with-sg2380-a-revolutionary-risc-v-desktop-experience/780 https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-wi...) They use four X280 cores with custom matrix extension as a "TPU", but more interestingly has out-of-order cores with 128 bit vectors, that are supposed to be between the Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A78 in performance. Andes also announced a RISC-V SOC with 512 bit vectors, the QiLai SOC. It has in-order AX45MP cores without vector, and one in-order NX27V core with RVV 1.0, that can "generating up to 4 512-bit results per cycle". They demoed a devboard at RISC-V Summit Europe, I think they had some object detection running on the NX27V core.
  - hajile 2y ago
    The price will be very high, but the vector unit isn't the reason at all. These target a very specialized market and they won't be selling billions of them like they do with other PIC designs. If a specialized chip costs $250M to get past all the red tape and out the door and you expect to sell 200k in the first couple years, your costs are going to be high (and you aren't going to wait any longer than that to pay off your R&D costs). Once the chip is fabbed, your post-fab requirements are also going to be very high and all that extra verification adds even more money to the process. If there are plans to sell these in something like a nuke plant, they'll also need a completely verified supply chain which drives up costs astronomically (when my father worked at one, a simple bolt that would cost you $0.10 at a hardware store would cost $100 due to all the chain of custody bureaucracy costs). While the chip is cutting edge year 1, by the time it's moving into year 5, it will be a commodity that must compete on price rather than being the latest and greatest. By year 10-30 (or whenever their support and supply guarantee contracts are ending), the big costs become maintenance. You have minimum amount of people you pay to sit around on support which costs millions per year. You have to keep around all the verification processes and people for the occasional chip order too (small wafer runs are expensive if they have to be done and if you're forced to do one after 20-30 years the old fabs and their process might not even exist requiring you to deal with all the bureaucracy of getting the design updated to the new process, getting new verification created and approved, etc). I'd be very surprised if these chips were under $5000 each and wouldn't be at all surprised if they were $10k or more.
    - brucehoult 2y ago
      These chips are replacing PowerPC RAD750 chips which were thought to sell for $200,000 in 2002 dollars, and probably more now. They have a maximum speed of 200 MHz.
      - hajile 2y ago
        Yeah. If they need all those certifications, I’d add another zero to the price. Things are different today. The ISA helps reduce lock-in and a lot of otherwise proprietary costs get amortized across companies and industries. There’s more competition coming up in that market which creates pricing pressure. There’s also just a bigger market in general. Auto companies (and other safety related fields) don’t care about rad certification necessarily, but are willing to buy chips like these for the redundancy features. Going from selling 200k chips over the product lifetime to selling 1M radically reduces per unit cost. In the AI age, iterating every other decade isn’t an option and the only other solution is finding a way to split the costs more.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sebazzz 2y ago
Out of curiosity, can the same end result be reached by using a normal CPU and extra outside hard shielding?

18 points by fork-bomber 2y ago

Note that this is only one of two new lines of chips announced by Microchip under the "PIC64" name. PIC was of course originally a proprietary 8 bit ISA designed for use in intelligent but low cost peripherals in the 1970s. PIC32 was a line of MIPS-based chips, but a couple of years ago they added 32 bit Arm Cortex-M cores to the line-up. This radiation tolerant chip uses eight quite new SiFive X280 RISC-V cores (announced April 2021) which are dual-issue in-order with large 512 bit vector unit. The other is the PIC64GX series, which uses four SiFive U54 64 bit single-issue Linux-capable RV64GC cores plus one E51 64 bit RV64IMAC real-time/controller core, all running at 625 MHz. There is no vector capability. Perhaps the best way to think of this chip is as a PolarFire SoC FPGA without the FPGA :-) They are advertised as being pin-compatible. https://static.dev.sifive.com/U54-MC-RVCoreIP.pdf https://static.dev.sifive.com/U54-MC-RVCoreIP.pdf These seem to be close to shipping, but you can't order just yet. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64gx https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/CURIOSITY-PIC64GX1000-KIT-ES https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/CURIOSITY-P...

thrtythreeforty 2y ago
I get the feeling these won't be cheap. Do you know of any other X280 cores available for mortals to buy? The only other microcontroller core I know of with a vector unit 512 or wider is the Xtensa Vision series, which is typically only shipped embedded in ASICs.
- camel-cdr 2y ago
  There is currently no SBC available with those cores, but there is one announced to be released in 2024 Q4: https://milkv.io/chips/sg2380 https://milkv.io/chips/sg2380 (see also this forum thread: https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-with-sg2380-a-revolutionary-risc-v-desktop-experience/780 https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-wi...) They use four X280 cores with custom matrix extension as a "TPU", but more interestingly has out-of-order cores with 128 bit vectors, that are supposed to be between the Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A78 in performance. Andes also announced a RISC-V SOC with 512 bit vectors, the QiLai SOC. It has in-order AX45MP cores without vector, and one in-order NX27V core with RVV 1.0, that can "generating up to 4 512-bit results per cycle". They demoed a devboard at RISC-V Summit Europe, I think they had some object detection running on the NX27V core.
- hajile 2y ago
  The price will be very high, but the vector unit isn't the reason at all. These target a very specialized market and they won't be selling billions of them like they do with other PIC designs. If a specialized chip costs $250M to get past all the red tape and out the door and you expect to sell 200k in the first couple years, your costs are going to be high (and you aren't going to wait any longer than that to pay off your R&D costs). Once the chip is fabbed, your post-fab requirements are also going to be very high and all that extra verification adds even more money to the process. If there are plans to sell these in something like a nuke plant, they'll also need a completely verified supply chain which drives up costs astronomically (when my father worked at one, a simple bolt that would cost you $0.10 at a hardware store would cost $100 due to all the chain of custody bureaucracy costs). While the chip is cutting edge year 1, by the time it's moving into year 5, it will be a commodity that must compete on price rather than being the latest and greatest. By year 10-30 (or whenever their support and supply guarantee contracts are ending), the big costs become maintenance. You have minimum amount of people you pay to sit around on support which costs millions per year. You have to keep around all the verification processes and people for the occasional chip order too (small wafer runs are expensive if they have to be done and if you're forced to do one after 20-30 years the old fabs and their process might not even exist requiring you to deal with all the bureaucracy of getting the design updated to the new process, getting new verification created and approved, etc). I'd be very surprised if these chips were under $5000 each and wouldn't be at all surprised if they were $10k or more.
  - brucehoult 2y ago
    These chips are replacing PowerPC RAD750 chips which were thought to sell for $200,000 in 2002 dollars, and probably more now. They have a maximum speed of 200 MHz.
    - hajile 2y ago
      Yeah. If they need all those certifications, I’d add another zero to the price. Things are different today. The ISA helps reduce lock-in and a lot of otherwise proprietary costs get amortized across companies and industries. There’s more competition coming up in that market which creates pricing pressure. There’s also just a bigger market in general. Auto companies (and other safety related fields) don’t care about rad certification necessarily, but are willing to buy chips like these for the redundancy features. Going from selling 200k chips over the product lifetime to selling 1M radically reduces per unit cost. In the AI age, iterating every other decade isn’t an option and the only other solution is finding a way to split the costs more.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sebazzz 2y ago

Out of curiosity, can the same end result be reached by using a normal CPU and extra outside hard shielding?