By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -NextSilicon, an Israeli startup whose computer chips are being evaluated by U.S. national laboratories, said on Wednesday it is developing a central processor that it hopes will rival Intel and AMD and help it compete with Nvidia systems.
NextSilicon has raised $300 million in funding and its flagship “Maverick-2” chip is designed to accelerate precision scientific computing tasks such as nuclear weapons modeling. That field was once dominated by Nvidia, but as Nvidia turned its attention to lower-precision computing tasks such as artificial intelligence, startups like NextSilicon have tried to take advantage of the AI ​​giant’s shift.
On Wednesday, NextSilicon also revealed for the first time that it is developing a complement to its main chip in the form of a new central processing unit, a market still dominated by Intel and AMD. It uses technology called RISC-V, an open computing standard that competes with Arm Ltd and is increasingly used by chip giants such as Nvidia and Broadcom.
Nvidia often pairs its chip with its own or a third-party central processing unit, and even partners with companies like Intel to create tighter coupling between the two classes of chips.
Currently, NextSilicon said its central processing unit remains a test chip. But its Maverick-2 chips are in production and NextSilicon claims it can do some of the same work as Nvidia chips, but faster, using less power and without rewriting the software code used. Sandia National Laboratories has been evaluating prototype systems made with NextSilicon chips for three years.
James H. Laros III, senior scientist and Vanguard program leader at Sandia National Laboratories, said in a statement that NextSilicon’s “performance results are impressive and show real promise for advancing our computational capabilities without the overhead of extensive code modifications.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)