Soft Machines Launches Virtual CPU Cores

Although chip technology has made great advances, new developments see very little implementation unless they’re integrated into the chips of major manufacturers, including AMD, ARM (News - Alert), Intel and Qualcomm. Soft Machines, a late-stage semiconductor startup with substantial funding, has launched virtual CPU cores with better performance across the board than traditional architecture for the IoT, mobile and cloud markets.

Unlike microprocessors based on CISC and RISC architectures that rely on physical cores and software threads, the VISC architecture is based on the concept of “virtual cores” and “virtual hardware threads,” which enables dynamic allocation and sharing of resources across cores. While the CISC and RISC architectures were constrained by transistor utilization, frequency and power scaling limitations, VISC opens great opportunities for scaling without the limitations of existing technology.

Some of the features of the VISC architecture include:

• Achieving three to four times more instructions per cycle (IPC (News - Alert)), resulting in two to four times higher performance per watt on single- and multi-threaded applications.
• Uses a light-weight “virtual software layer,” the VISC architecture can be applied to existing and new software ecosystems.
• Doesn’t have physical limitations of traditional CPU cores, enabling dynamic allocation and sharing of resources across cores for improved performance and power efficiency.
• Automatically generates virtual hardware threads ‘under the hood’ without affecting ecosystem software, which is much more efficient than software multi-threading requiring re-writing software applications.
• A light-weight “virtual software layer” that makes VISC architecture applicable to existing ISAs as well as new software ecosystems.

According to PCWorld, “one virtual-core, single-threaded VISC chip offers 1.7 times to 2.2 times the performance of a single-core application CPU. Put another way, a 32-bit 2 virtual-core (VC) chip with 1 Mbyte of cache generated an estimated 2.1 instructions per clock using the SPEC 2006 benchmark. A single-core Intel (News - Alert) “Haswell” Core chip produced 1.39 instructions per clock.”

Virtualization technology has been applied by Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to introduce new levels of efficiency for enterprise applications, mobility, communications and more. The new Soft Machines chip is going to disrupt an industry that has been slow to accept changes because of the R&D capital they have in existing chips and the planned life-time they have in place for each successive generation. Only time will tell how far the VISC platform will go, but the financial backing it has received could be a big indicator of the potential the technology holds.

 “CPU scaling was declared dead when the power wall forced CISC- and RISC-based designs into multi-core implementations that require unrealistically complex multi-threading of sequential applications. The VISC architecture solves this problem ‘under the hood’ by running virtual hardware threads on virtual cores that far exceed the efficiency of software multi-threading,” said Soft Machines co-founder, president and CTO Mohammad Abdallah.