T he European Processor Initiative (EPI) is a project made up of 28 partners from 10 EU countries, including the BMW Group, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), the University of Zagreb and more. It aims to allow the EU to gain independence in HPC chip technology, and recently announced (https://bit.ly/lxf282epiannouncement) that samples of its EPAC1.0 RISC-V Test Chip have now been delivered, and initial tests look to have been very promising. Based on the RISC-V open source architecture, the chip is made up of power-efficient and high-throughput accelerator cores named EPAC (European Processor Accelerators). The 22nm test chips were made at GlobalFoundries, which used to be part of AMD, and it means the EU joins a growing list of countries and governments that are turning to RISC-V to create their own processors.
Close-ups of the test samples.
CREDIT: EPI