We must bear in mind that Intel Core or AMD Ryzen are not suitable for everything. There are different segments, such as the automotive industry, medicine, avionics, etc., that require specific solutions. Different architectures or processes can be used for their development and production.
ESA has a new space processor
The solution developed by ESA is based on the RISC-V open architecture. This architecture allows the creation of open source processors or, in other words, anyone can use and/or modify this processor. This chip has been named Occany and is intended for space exploration.
Something interesting is that it will not be produced by TSMC, but will be produced by GlobalFoundries. About this foundry, say that it is the former division of AMD’s own production. What’s more, a few years ago they announced that they would not continue developing new lithographs and would optimize the ones they had.
Specifically, this ESA processor is based on the GlobalFoundries 12 nm LLP process. Have a chiplet design (similar to AMD Ryzen) in a 2.5D structure. Each of the chiplets has no less than 216 cores with an area of just 73 square millimeters.
The same package has specific floating point units FPU 64-bit, of which we don’t know more. In addition, this processor integrates two 16 GB HBM2e memories manufactured by Micron.
It has an interposer manufactured in the 65nm process and the area of the substrate is 52.5×45 mm.
It is not a processor with brutal performance, since it is not exactly looking for that. This processor offers performance in FP64 floating point of 0.75 TFlops and in INT8 it offers up to 6 Tops. The performance is not exceptional, in fact, it seems quite low, but the power consumption is ridiculous. This extremely low consumption is allowed by not using the heat sink.
European plans to develop their own chips
There has been a lot of talk for some time about the EU’s plans to create its own processors. There are also plans (or had) to manufacture chips on European soil, although little else is known about it at the moment.
Using the RISC-V architecture is a great solution, since it does not involve paying royalties. The ARM architecture involves a significant royalty payment and a much higher cost than using a free architecture. On the downside, this open source architecture is very limited and requires specific software.
RISC-V is a processor architecture with simplified and open instructions. The big problem with this architecture is in the software, since it is very new and there is hardly any compatible and optimized software. Although, we are seeing a lot of adoption of this type of design, so the amount of supported software should grow rapidly.
