According to the trio, the Neoverse N1 System Development Platform (SDP) is the industry’s first 7nm infrastructure development platform enabling asymmetrical compute acceleration via the CCIX interconnect architecture and is available to hardware and software developers for hardware prototyping, software development, system validation, and performance profiling/tuning.
The SDP includes a Neoverse N1-based SoC with an operating frequency of up to 3GHz, full-sized caches and generous amounts of memory bandwidth with the latest optimised system IP. The robustness of the SDP is ideal for development, debug, performance optimisation and workload analysis on a wide range of applications including those for machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics.
The Neoverse N1 SDP includes Cadence IP for CCIX, PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 4 and DDR4 PHY IP. The SDP was implemented and verified using a full Cadence tool flow in TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process technology, the industry’s first 7nm process technology in volume production, and provides connectivity to Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ FPGAs over the CCIX chip-to-chip coherent interconnect protocol via the Xilinx Alveo U280 CCIX accelerator card. For customers with intense compute workloads, CCIX offers a significant accelerator usability improvement as well as improved data cente performance/efficiency, lowering the barrier to entry into existing server infrastructure systems and improving the total cost of ownership (TCO) of acceleration systems.
The Neoverse N1 SDP will be available in limited quantities in Q2 2019 with wider availability in subsequent quarters. The software stack can be accessed through Linaro and GitHub open-source repositories providing developers with an out-of-the-box Linux software experience.
The Xilinx Alveo U280 accelerator card, which features a FPGA with integrated high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and a CCIX interface, is available now and can be purchased directly from Xilinx here. Additionally, the full Cadence SoC implementation and verification flows, CCIX, PCIe Gen 4 and DDR4 IP, and the Neoverse N1 Rapid Adoption Kit (RAK) are available now, so customers can begin designing Neoverse N1-based SoCs on TSMC’s 7nm silicon immediately.
For more information on the Neoverse N1 SDP, follow the below link.
