Coinciding with the Hot Chips conference, startup Esperanto emerged from stealth mode this week with the highest performance commercial RISC-V chip to date – a thousand-core AI accelerator designed for hyper-scale data centers. While the chip can be run in a number of voltage and power profiles between 10 and 60 W, its “sweet spot” is 20 W of power per chip, a configuration that allows six chips to be mounted on a Glacier Point accelerator card, keeping total consumption under 120 W. Total performance from six chips is approximately 800 TOPS.
Esperanto’s ET-SoC-1 is billed as having the most RISC-V cores ever built on a single chip: 1,093. The count includes 1,088 ET-Minion custom RISC-V cores that serve as energy efficient AI acceleration engines. Also included are four ET-Maxion RISC-V cores and a RISC-V service processor. The entire design is geared toward energy efficiency.