Chinese IC design firm unveils 64-core CPU

SAN FRANCISCO - Phytium Technology Co Ltd, a Chinese integrated circuit (IC) design firm, has unveiled its latest product, a 64-core central processing unit (CPU), and a related prototype computer server at a technology event in Silicon Valley.

The company, based in Tianjin, northern China, claims that its FT-2000/64 CPU, with 4.8 billion transistors on a die 25.38 millimeters in width and 25.38 millimeters in length within a chip package 55 millimeters in width and 55 millimeters in length, is the first of its kind adopting the Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) architecture.

As RISC stands for reduced instruction set computer, the ARM architecture results in processors, as the heart of computers, with relatively less number of transistors and therefore reduced cost, heat and power use.

At Hot Chips, an annual symposium on high performance computer chips co-sponsored by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), in Cupertino, northern California, from Sunday through Tuesday, engineers from Phytium said the new CPU chip, with 64-bit arithmetic compatible with ARMv8 instructions, is able to perform 512 billion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) at base frequency of 2.0 GHz and on 100 watts of power dissipation.

While the architecture is licensed from ARM Holdings, a British company, Phytium has designed its own cores, known as FTC661s, which are the units that read and execute program instructions, such as add, move data and branch, to be integrated into the chip, enabling it to run multiple instructions at the same time in what is called parallel computing.

One of major CPU developers in China, Phytium's previous CPU series integrate either 4 or 16 cores.

Shying off comparing its products with more typical complex instruction set computing (CISC) x86 processors, such as those manufactured by Intel Corporation, one of the world's largest chip makers based on revenue, Phytium says the FT-2000/64 is so far the best in the ARM category.

According to a sales respresentative, Phytium has provided thousands of CPUs to system builders that supply equipment for government institutions, telecommunication businesses, banks and public utilities in China, and its latest chip is expected to be used in high-throughput and high-performance servers.