C-DAC to Launch India’s First Homegrown Arm Architecture Processor

The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in India has announced its endeavor to create a suite of processors founded on the Arm architecture. This initiative is designed to proffer a spectrum of choices for domestic applications, encompassing intelligent devices, the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality to high-performance computing, and data center-utilized chips. The flagship AUM chip devised explicitly for High-Performance Computing (HPC), is among these. Following the preliminary details of the Arm processor disclosed, the anticipation is that this chip will be launched between 2023 and 2024.

As per the report by Wccftech, the AUM chip, as a product-oriented towards high-performance computing, boasts 96 cores, codenamed “Zeus”, built on the Arm Neoverse V1 architecture. It is equipped with a maximum of 96GB of HBM3 memory and also supports 16-channel DDR5 memory. The 96 cores are distributed across two sub-chips, with each A48Z-based sub-chip comprising 48 cores, independent memory, I/O interfaces, C2C/D2D interconnects, cache, security, and MSCP subsystems, among others. Each sub-chip is fitted with 96MB of L2 cache and 96MB of system cache, with the two sub-chips interconnected through D2D sub-chips on the same board.

Moreover, the AUM chip provides 64/128 PCIe 5.0 channels and supports CXL, operating on a platform capable of accommodating two of these chips. It was fabricated employing TSMC’s 5nm process, and its frequency ranges between 3GHz and 3.5GHz. Each processor node can offer a computational power of 10TFLOPs, with each slot contributing over 4.6TFLOPs of computing power. In the case of a dual-slot server, it can support a maximum of four standard GPU accelerators.

Additionally, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing is preparing a set of HPC system software and development tools, with the aim of enabling developers to harness the full potential of the hardware.