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Czech Republic to lead European computer processor development
The European Union is preparing to develop its own chip suitable for deployment in supercomputers. These are large mainframe machines designed for artificial intelligence calculations or simulations for the development of drugs, chemicals, batteries, car manufacturing and so on. Supercomputers today primarily use chips from US companies Intel, AMD and Nvidia, but the European Commission wants its own alternative. The first part of a project to develop a chip worth billions of crowns will start soon. The core of its processor is to be the technology of the Brno-based company Codasip.
The European Commission is expected to publish the results of a public tender in the coming weeks to launch the first phase of the development of a European chip that should in the future be extended from supercomputers to regular servers used in data centres. The current phase will cost 120 million euros, more than three billion crowns. In the future, the funding could extend to around one billion euros.
The European Commission has not yet commented on the results, but according to some sources, the Brno-based company Codasip, accompanied by the national supercomputing centre IT4Innovations at VŠB in Ostrava, has succeeded in the three-billion-dollar venture.
Codasip designs processor cores based on RISC-V technology. It is a set of instructions and rules by which processors, the main computer brains, perform computations. RISC-V is a competitor to the long-standing ARM and x86 standards (Intel and AMD). These are burdened by licensing fees and closedness, while RISC-V is an open technology, like open source software. The chip market sees great potential in RISC-V. Codasip's processors alone are already integrated in the order of billions of chips. The customer is, among others, Mobileye, Intel's autonomous car division.
The European chip is to use RISC-V.The European Commission has included this technology in the so-called Chips Act to support the European semiconductor industry. The project named DARE, in which the Czechs succeeded, is intended to develop these efforts.
DARE will have two parts - one to focus on processors (competing with Intel, ARM and AMD) and the other on accelerators, an alternative to Nvidia's AI chips. Codasip and IT4Innovations are to focus on processors. "I can confirm that we are part of the DARE consortium. Our involvement will be mainly related to optimising processor power consumption," Zuzana Červenková, spokesperson for IT4Innovations.
According to Červenková, the development of the European processor is an important step towards digital sovereignty in Europe. "The Czech Republic's participation in this activity clearly places us among the European technological leaders in IT. At the same time, we will have access to cutting-edge technologies already at the stage of their development, which will give us a certain technological edge," Červenková added.
Source: https://www.e15.cz/
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