Ventana Introduces Veyron, World’s First Data Center Class RISC-V CPU Product Family


Ventana Micro Systems Inc. today announced its Veyron family of high performance RISC-V processors. The Veyron V1 is the first member of the family, and the highest performance RISC-V processor available today. It will be offered in the form of high performance chiplets and IP. Ventana Founder and CEO Balaji Baktha will make the public announcement during his RISC-V Summit keynote today.

The Veyron V1 is the first RISC-V processor to provide single thread performance that is competitive with the latest incumbent processors for Data Center, Automotive, 5G, AI, and Client applications. The Veyron V1 efficient microarchitecture also enables the highest single socket performance among competing architectures.

Veyron V1’s efficient performance combined with RISC-V’s open and extensible architecture enables customer innovation and workload optimization. This results in further workload efficiency gains through domain specific acceleration that will extend Moore’s Law to deal with the emerging energy and thermal constraints for data centers.

The standards-based Veyron V1 compute chiplet and reference platform enable customers a time to market acceleration of up to two years and reduction of development costs by up to 75%. Chiplet based solutions also provide better unit economics by right sizing compute, IO, and memory. Composable architectures leveraging chiplets allow companies to focus on their innovation and differentiation to achieve workload optimization. Additionally, Ventana provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) which includes an extensive set of software building blocks already proven on Ventana’s RISC-V platform.

“Our vision of delivering the highest performance RISC-V CPUs is helping to reshape next generation high performance open hardware architectures,” said Balaji Baktha, Founder and CEO of Ventana. “Today, we have a significant first mover advantage by providing a platform that can allow customers to innovate and differentiate. Markets which require high performance compute such as Data Center, 5G, AI, Automotive, and Client will all benefit from our open standards-based, ultra low latency chiplet solution that delivers rapid productization with significant reduction in development time and cost compared to the prevailing IP models. Ventana’s strong roadmap and customer engagement puts the company in prime position for sustained market leadership.”

The new RISC-V CPU core is the centerpiece of the first compute chiplet solution with chiplets supplied by different companies. Ventana’s Veyron platform solution also enables integration of a flexible Domain Specific Accelerator for hardware/software codesign. Veyron V1 is available in the second half of 2023 and is the first in a series of products from Ventana. High performance features of the Veyron V1 include: enterprise class RAS, virtualization, robust security, top-down performance tuning, and system IP such as IOMMU and advanced interrupt controller.

“Ventana has a world class team with an average of twenty plus years of experience bringing multiple new CPU architectures to market,” said Patrick Moorhead, Founder and Chief Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Ventana is the first big core in RISC-V to show up, the only game in town, and has a jump on the market.”

Veyron V1 Features

  • Eight wide, aggressive out-of-order pipeline
  • 3.6 GHz
  • 5 nm process technology
  • 16 cores per cluster
  • High core count multi-cluster scalability up to 128 cores
  • 48 MB of shared L3 cache per cluster
  • Advanced side channel attack mitigations
  • Comprehensive RAS features
  • Top-down performance tuning methodology
  • Provided with IOMMU and Advanced Interrupt Architecture (AIA) system IP
  • SDK released with necessary software already ported to Veyron
  • Veyron V1 Development Platform available