Chip startup Akeana announced its existence this week. The company, founded by the developers of the ThunderX2 server chip, is releasing three basic processor designs that other companies can license.
Akiana It says it is launching three basic processor designs. It has raised $100 million in investment. The company was quietly founded in 2021 and is now unveiling its first products. Akeana was founded by former Marvell Technology employees who previously worked on ThunderX2 and ThunderX3-Arm server processors.
The three processor designs that Akeana is now launching are based on RISC-V, a completely open source instruction set architecture. Akeana has released three CPU core designs. The Akyana 100 Series It has 32-bit RISC-V cores and is dedicated to e.g. Implanted To control appliances and IoT devices, although the cores are also suitable for computers according to the startup.
the Akyana 1000 Series In turn, it contains 64-bit cores, and supports both internal and external pipelines and Memory Management UnitOr MMO. Thus, this series supports full operating systems. The cores also support multi-threading. Customers can also expand the designs using extensions. For example, Akeana mentions hypervisor extensions and AI compute extensions. According to Akeana, the 1000 series is “optimized for a wide range of applications.” The manufacturer mentions smart home equipment and wearable devices, among others.
Finally, the startup comes with Akyana 5000 Serieswhich is dedicated to High performance Applications. According to the company, this series can be used for mobile devices running Android or Linux, but also for data centers or cloud clusters. According to Akeana, these cores have “significantly higher” single-threaded performance than the 1000 series, although the company does not share any specific benchmarks.
Akeana says companies could pack 1,000 to 5,000 cores onto a single chip. This should be similar to a large architecture, where powerful CPU cores are combined with more power-efficient cores. Companies could create clusters of up to eight Akeana cores. However, it’s not clear how many of these clusters could fit on a chip.
RISC-V cores are inherently configurable and customizable. Each core series mentioned will be available in different variants. For example, these variants will have different cache sizes and pipeline configurations. Customers can also customize cores with extensions, such as the aforementioned AI or hypervisor extensions. However, there are also extensions for cryptography, additional caches, and support for them. Custom Instructions and more.
Akeana won’t make entire processors itself. The startup makes its RISC-V core designs completely available to other companies, which can license them and use them to design their own SoCs. In doing so, it will compete with Arm, which has a similar strategy. The three core types mentioned are available immediately.
