NetSpeed and Esperanto partner to power SoCs for artificial intelligence

NetSpeed Systems and Esperanto Technologies has announced that Esperanto has licensed NetSpeed’s IP and intelligent design environment for its Supercomputer-on-a-Chip for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Esperanto’s 7nm chip will integrate thousands of RISC-V compatible processors each with vector/tensor accelerators and all connected with NetSpeed’s NoC IP.

AI applications demand new architectures to meet the need for unprecedented performance, sophisticated functionality and ultra-low power. Interconnect technology is a critical component of these architectures.

“We are still in the early stages of AI maturity, but what we’ve learned is that sophisticated neural networks require tremendous performance,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “Generating this level of performance often requires a large number of cores, but these architectures can be difficult to design and test. NoC technology, such as NetSpeed’s, has become an important enabling technology for AI because it automates the process of connecting CPUs and accelerators on a complex SoC.”

“Esperanto is putting thousands of processors and accelerators on a single chip, and our challenge was how to interconnect them. NetSpeed provided a compelling solution for interconnecting our cores with high performance and by licensing their IP we can reduce our time to market as well,” said Dave Ditzel, CEO of Esperanto Technologies.

Esperanto’s high-performance ET-Maxion cores are designed to deliver the highest single thread RISC-V performance. Its ET-Minion cores are designed for energy efficiency and high floating point throughput, including vector/tensor acceleration. With thousands of energy efficient 64-bit RISC-V cores on one chip, Esperanto will deliver industry-leading TeraFlops/Watt of scalable computing performance for artificial intelligence, machine learning and other applications.

“NetSpeed and Esperanto share a similar gene—we are both at the leading edge of what can be done in our respective domains,” said Sundari Mitra, CEO of NetSpeed. “While Esperanto is focused on bringing AI to high-volume applications through their highly-parallel architecture leveraging the RISC-V instruction set, NetSpeed is focused on bringing the power of machine learning to SoC design and architecture. It is indeed an honor to work with a trailblazing partner like Esperanto. This design win is a further validation of our leadership in the AI market.”