In late October, Soft Machines Inc., a Silicon Valley-based semiconductor startup company with an important R&D center in Russia, unveiled the Soft Machines VISC architecture – a “breakthrough” in microprocessor performance-per-watt scaling that will “significantly improve performance and power for all segments of the computing ecosystem,” according to the company.
“We’ve been quietly building the company and developing the VISC architecture for more than seven years. Now that we have working silicon proving the invention, the time to unveil our breakthrough has arrived,” said Soft Machines co-founder, vice chairman and CEO Mahesh Lingareddy.
The VISC architecture has been developed in response to single-core frequency and power-scaling issues and multi-core programming challenges. Based on the concept of “virtual cores” and “virtual hardware threads,” its new approach enables dynamic allocation and sharing of resources across cores, according to the company.
Microprocessors based on CISC and RISC architectures make use of “physical cores” and “software threads,” an approach that has been technologically and economically hamstrung by transistor utilization, frequency and power-scaling limitations. The VISC architecture achieves 3-4 times more instructions per cycle (IPC), resulting in 2-4 times higher performance per watt on single- and multi-threaded applications. Moreover, VISC uses a light-weight “virtual software layer” that makes VISC architecture applicable to existing as well as new software ecosystems.
The VISC architecture scales by changing the number of virtual cores and virtual threads. This approach provides a single architecture capable of addressing the needs of applications spanning from the Internet of Things (IoT), to mobile, and to data center markets.
Soft Machines is a 250-person late-stage semiconductor startup with operations in the USA, India and Russia and more than $125 million in funding to date.
Russia’s RVC, the state-backed fund of funds for innovation, and Rusnano, the nanotechnology state corporation, were part of the international investor pool that financed Soft Machines development from 2011 to 2014. Among other investors were Kacst/Taqnia (Saudi Arabia), Mubdala (UAE), AMD, Broadcom, and Samsung.
Please click here for more details on the technical aspects of Soft Machines’ new CPU approach.
1. What has been Russia’s involvement in the project ?
Soft Machines runs an R&D center in Russia with approximately 60 employees, who were strong contributors to successful project implementation.
Moreover, RVC and Rusnano are both investors in the company. This participation was not made public at that time since the company was in stealth mode.
As a result, Dmitry Akhanov of Rusnano and myself are members of the Soft Machines board of directors. We thus worked very closely to pull off this tremendous achievement.
2. Could Russia benefit from these developments from a technological point of view?
As part of the investment deal, RVC or its partners have got licensing rights for the processor and SoC cores. This could be a great foundation for starting a semiconductor business in Russia.
Even more importantly, this success story – with our influence in the making of the product for the last three and a half years – is a beacon for the importance of global cooperation, having not been dragged down by geopolitical troubles. The US headquarters combined with Russian and Indian development centers created together a world-class, breakthrough product. Bright minds coming together from around the world, including Saudi Arabian and UAE investors and partners, is just fantastic.
