MIPS released its P8700 CPU based on the RISC-V computing architecture to target driver assistance and autonomous vehicle applications.
The San Jose, California-based company, which focuses on developing efficient and configurable computing, licenses its designs to other chip makers. Today, it is announcing the start of general availability of the MIPS P8700 series RISC-V processor.
MIPS CEO Sameer Vasan said, “MIPS is designed to meet the low-latency, intensive data movement demands of the most advanced automotive applications such as ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) and autonomous vehicles.” The P8700 delivers high-speed compute, power efficiency and scalability. , in an interview with VentureBeat.
“Automotive is a big segment where we focus. It continues to be a very interesting space. Some companies have come and some have disappeared,” Wasson said. “They lost interest. They came out of COVID and replenished their inventory. But what’s happening in the industry right now is very interesting. I think autonomous is now coming back to that steady growth rate. “
He added, “One of the biggest driving forces is to continue to innovate in terms of bringing better solutions. If you think about today’s solutions, most of the deployment in vehicles is driven by vehicle technology. These were basic microcontrollers, they could open and close doors, run internal combustion engines. It gives you a high degree of autonomy surface allows.”
“We have the technology and we have the role to make it more mainstream than ever before,” he said.
Common solutions for ADAS and autonomous driving rely on a brute-force approach of embedding a large number of cores at high clock rates, albeit with unrealistic and unrealistic performance.
The P8700 with its multi-threaded and power-efficient architecture allows MIPS users to implement fewer CPU cores and much lower thermal design power (TDP) than current market solutions, thereby enabling OEMs to make ADAS solutions affordable and highly scalable. Allows for scalable development. It also reduces the system constraints of data movement failure by providing a highly efficient, optimized and low power latency sensitive solution that is specifically designed for interference-ridden multi-sensor platforms.
“If you look at the RISC-V space as a whole, I think these spaces are poised for disruption, with the opportunity for new architectures to come in,” Wasson said. “Otherwise, EVs will become more expensive than they need to be.”
For Level 2 or higher ADAS systems with AI autonomous software stacks, the MIPS P8700 can also offload core processing elements that cannot be easily quantified in deep learning and sparsity-based convolution. can be reduced by processing functions, resulting in AI stack improvements of more than 30 percent. Use and performance of the software.
“The automotive market demands CPUs that can process large amounts of data from multiple sensors in real-time and feed the AI accelerator to process it efficiently,” Wasson said. said “MIPS multi-threading and other architectural hooks designed for automotive applications make it a compelling core for data-intensive processing tasks. It will enable automotive OEMs to have high-performance compute systems. which consume less power and make better use of the AI accelerator.
The MIPS P8700 core, featuring RISC-V ISA-based multi-core/multi-cluster and multi-threaded CPU IP, is now moving into series production with several major OEMs. Major customers like Mobileye (Nasdaq: MBLY) have adopted this approach for future products for self-driving vehicles and highly automated driving systems.
“MIPS has been a key contributor to our success with the EyeQ™ system-on-chip for ADAS and autonomous vehicles,” Elchanan Rushinek, Executive Vice President of Engineering for Mobileye, said in a statement. “The launch of the MIPS P8700 RISC-V core will help drive our continued growth for global automakers, enabling greater efficiency and optimal performance at cost and power consumption.”
The P8700 series is a high-performance out-of-order processor that implements the RISC-V RV64GC architecture, which includes new CPU and system-level features that improve performance, power, area form factors and build on the legacy MIPS micro. Designed for additional proven features. The architecture is deployed in more than 30+ car models in the global OEM market today.
Engineered to deliver industry-leading compute density, the latest MIPS processor utilizes three key architectural features, including MIPS out-of-order multithreading, which enables multiple processes.
Instructions from multiple threads (hearts) per clock cycle, providing high utilization and CPU efficiency.
It also features integrated multi-core, multi-cluster, where the P8700 series scales up to 6 integrated P8700 cores in a cluster with each cluster supporting a direct attach accelerator.
And it is designed to meet the ASIL-B(D) functional safety standard (ISO26262) by including several fault detection capabilities such as end-to-end parity protection on the address and data buses, software visible registers, On parity protection, fault. Just to report bugs in the system, and
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The MIPS P8700 processor is now available to the wider market, with key contributions already in place. Shipments are expected soon, along with OEM launches. MIPS has been around for almost three decades and billions of its chips have been shipped to date.
In the past, Wasson said vendors were using the wrong computer architecture, built for entertainment and screen applications, rather than for hard AI problems.
“What we’re trying to do is focus on building compute and higher levels of autonomy for ADAS,” he said. He said.
Vasant Warren, global head of business development at MIPS, said in an interview with VentureBeat that other architectures are driving performance through brute force, adding more complexity and scaling, but not necessarily cost-effective designs. come with
“If you want to bring it to a big market, you want autonomy to be affordable, and you want it to scale,” Warren said. “For lack of a better word, a more pure approach was needed, and that’s what drove us. From the ground up the 8700 is where you can seamlessly transfer data between different parts of a design. If you look at a car, you have a lot of sensors coming in from cameras, radar, LiDAR, and in some cases it needs an AI accelerator to process the inputs need to be delivered to the system and then This data needs to help you make a decision.
MIPS designs try to offload a lot of performance from AI accelerators, whether it’s in pre-processing or post-processing. With a general-purpose processor, new software can be supported, and such software for AI accelerators changes all the time.
RISC-V has been building its ecosystem over the past two years, and its ecosystem is now at the right size to support the applications.
“The other big thing that’s happening is software-defined vehicles. Our products can be used to build a complete software-defined vehicle architecture,” Warren said. “We are completely focused on autonomous travel.”
Wasson said his company will be at the CES 2025 event in Las Vegas in January, where pitching to automakers will be a big task for the company.
Credit : venturebeat.com
