VISC CPU Promises 3-4X Higher IPC, AMD's a Chief Investor

A startup company by the name of Soft Machines has simply exited its "stealth" phase and gone public for the starting time time at the Linley Processor Conference. Which many startups go through to ensure that their ideas are protected and their principal goals are met before they go public.

"The VISC architecture achieves 3-4 times more than instructions per cycle (IPC), resulting in 2-iv times higher operation per watt on unmarried- and multi-threaded applications. Moreover, VISC uses a low-cal-weight "virtual software layer" that makes VISC architecture applicable to existing as well as new software ecosystems." The company claimed in its press release.

Soft Machines is based in Santa Clara, California, USA with operations in India and Russia. It has over 250 employees and is in the business of licensing and co-developing VISC-architecture-based Core and SoC products. It's been operating since 2006 to deliver a new type of CPU architecture the company calls VISC. Which is short for Virtual Pedagogy Set Calculating.

The CEO of the visitor Mahesh Lingareddy forth with the President, CTO and co-founder Mohammad Abdallah both came from Intel to found Soft Machines. Their principal goal was to bring back single-threaded scaling at the pace of golden age Silicon Valley and they program to practise merely that with the VISC architecture.

AMD, Samsung and Globalfoundries Invest in a Brand New CPU Architecture For The Next Era of Computing

Soft Machines has already accumulated over $125 million in funding. Leading investors are Samsung Ventures, AMD and Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi owned parent visitor of AMD's ex-manufacturing arm Globalfoundries.

Presenting at the Linley Processor Briefing, Abdallah had this to say :
"CPU scaling was declared dead when the ability wall forced CISC- and RISC-based designs into multi-cadre implementations that require unrealistically complex multi-threading of sequential applications. The VISC architecture solves this problem 'under the hood' past running virtual hardware threads on virtual cores that far exceed the efficiency of software multi-threading."

Intel, AMD, ARM... you name it have only managed to improve IPC by less than 10% with every generation. Soft Machines promises to offer triple and even quadruple the IPC of current processors and at a lower power envelope. That'due south a very ambitious goal but the company already has working prototype hardware to back information technology upwards.

VISC TestSetup
The company already showcased a working dual virtual cadre processor running Linux. The SOC in question was built on TSMC'southward 28nm process and has ane billion transistors. Of which only 20% are dedicated to the core IP of Soft Machines.
VISC Benchmark The end upshot is mighty impressive. The VISC implementation outpaced all other competing CPU cores without exception. Fifty-fifty outperfroming Intel'south Haswell core by a sizable 51%. That's a very impressive lead considering that the company really intends to address an aggressively depression power envelope that would facilitate going into mobile devices such as wearables, phones and tablets.

VISC performance/w The applied science works by allowing multiple CPU cores to piece of work on a single software thread. Something that was previously thought impossible. The company didn't go into the specifics of how this is achieved simply they state that it's uniform with whatever ISA (Instruction Set up Architecture). Meaning we could very well see this engineering science adopted past Samsung and AMD in ARM and x86 CPU architectures.
VISC Virtual Core
This is evidently important because it enables operation gains in single threaded applications when using multi-core CPUs. Nosotros no longer have to be as reliant on the software to be smart enough to fully utilize a multi-cadre CPU. And that'south indeed an exciting prospect to ponder upon if only briefly.