Ventana Micro Systems raises $38M to style datacenter RISC-V processors

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Ventana Micro Systems has raised $38 million to style datacenter RISC-V processors as aspect of a push to make open hardware.

Ventana’s chips will be based on RISC-V, a new open supply processor architecture that has emerged as an option to the well-known Arm chip architecture. The latter may develop into aspect of Nvidia one of these days if regulators approve the company’s $40 billion Arm acquisition. In contrast to Arm, RISC-V charges no royalty charges.

Cupertino, California-based Ventana was began in 2018 by business veterans Balaji Baktha and Greg Favor. I met Favor back in the 1990s when he was chip architect for NexGen, which was acquired by AMD. He went on to develop into the architect of quite a few chips at Montalvo Systems, Applied Micro, and Ampere Computing.

The funding came from Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai (founders of Marvell Technology Group) and other prominent semiconductor investors. Ventana has raised $53 million to date.

A track record

Baktha and Favor have a track record of delivering higher-functionality processors. Ventana plans to offer you datacenter-class higher-functionality RISC-V central processing units (CPUs) with extensible instruction set capability delivered in the type of multi-core chiplets. The business also delivers a customizable program-on-chip (SoC) chiplet enabling hyperscalers and other people to realize speedy productization when innovating.

“In the age of software-defined everything, open and extensible compute is the key to driving innovation,” Favor stated in an e mail to VentureBeat. “Ventana was founded to address the market need for a high-performance, customizable, and secure processor as the datacenter moves toward a disaggregated architecture and domain-specific accelerators. Ventana’s chiplet-based approach enables customers to achieve rapid productization and add unique customizations to differentiate their products.”

This suggests the business will be capable to customize its chips for the application at hand. I asked Favor why the business is adopting the RISC-V architecture.

“Rather than being beholden to the rigid nature of proprietary instruction set architecture (ISA) that stifles innovation, RISC-V’s open architecture is extensible to address specific market verticals and offers the ability to unlock innovation via custom instructions,” Favor stated. “Additionally, RISC-V saves tens of millions of dollars in architecture license fees.”

Changing instances

In an age when Moore’s Law (the prediction that chip functionality will double each and every couple of years) is slowing down since we are hitting manufacturing miniaturization limits, custom applications and custom chips are anticipated to generate large functionality leaps to maintain electronics progress on track.

Ventana’s compute chiplets are developed to provide rapidly single thread functionality optimized for cloud, enterprise datacenter, 5G, edge compute, and automotive applications. Ventana’s exceptional microarchitectural innovations make its style very transportable across distinctive fabs and course of action nodes.

Baktha stated in a statement that almost half of computing functionality is moving away from common-objective processors in favor of infrastructure compute and custom accelerators. (Intel stated as a lot last week). That favors Ventana’s chiplet method, he stated. Cisco executive VP Eyal Dagan backed up that claim.

Ventana’s modular, scalable chiplet-based solution technique enables a substantial reduction in development time and expense compared to the prevailing intellectual home model (at Arm). While Ventana’s compute chiplets maximize functionality by targeting cutting-edge course of action geometries, shoppers can implement their exceptional SoC chiplet silicon in the most optimal course of action node for the target application.

To make certain interoperability, Ventana delivers a parallel die-to-die (D2D) option capable of really low latencies, higher bandwidth, and lowest energy. The D2D option is compliant with the OCP Open Domain-Specific Architecture (ODSA) physical interface normal.

“As Moore’s Law is slowing, the industry is moving toward chiplet-based designs that optimize cost by using the right process node for each component of the design,” Linley Group principal analyst Linley Gwennap stated in a statement. “Ventana’s chiplet strategy accelerates deployment of this emerging approach across a broad range of customers and partners while tapping rising adoption of the open source RISC-V architecture.”

Ventana has more than one hundred staff and will employ more as it comes out of stealth, Favor stated.

“Ventana’s compute chiplets are designed to deliver best-in-class single thread performance optimized for cloud, enterprise datacenter, 5G, edge compute, and automotive applications,” Favor stated.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz