NextSilicon reveals new processor chip in challenge to Intel, AMD
By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Israeli startup NextSilicon, whose computer chips are being evaluated by U.S. national laboratories, said on Wednesday it is developing a central processor that it hopes will rival Intel and AMD and help it compete with Nvidia’s systems.
NextSilicon has raised $300 million in funding, and its flagship “Maverick-2” chip is designed to speed up precision scientific computing tasks like modeling nuclear weapons. This space was once dominated by Nvidia, but Nvidia focused its attention on lower-precision computing tasks. artificial intelligenceStartups like NextSilicon tried to capitalize on the artificial intelligence giant’s shift.
On Wednesday, NextSilicon also announced for the first time that it has developed a complement to its main chip in the form of a new central processing unit; this market is still dominated by Intel and AMD. It uses technology called RISC-V, an open computing standard that competes with Arm Ltd and is increasingly being used by chip giants such as Nvidia and Broadcom.
Nvidia often pairs its chip with its own or third-party central processing unit, even partnering with companies like Intel to create a tighter coupling between the two classes of chips.
At this time, NextSilicon said that the central processing unit remains a test chip. But Maverick-2 chips are in production, and NextSilicon claims they can perform some of the same work as Nvidia chips, but faster, using less power, and without having to rewrite the software code used. Sandia National Laboratories has been evaluating prototype systems made with NextSilicon chips for three years.
James H. Laros III, senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories and Vanguard program leader, said in a statement that NextSilicon’s “performance results are impressive and show real promise in advancing our computing capabilities without the overhead of extensive code changes.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)
