Ed French reckons that Apitronix has developed the world’s most powerful real-time processor with 220 RISC-V cores. But that’s a mere fraction of the number that he believes their novel architecture can scale to!
As I see it, the achievement is not whether the Apitronix chip, called Cerebellum, is indeed ‘the world’s most powerful real-time processor’ - even though it makes a great website headline!
It’s the novel architecture designed by renowned real-time operating system entrepreneur - and Apitronix CTO - Ken Tindell that is the significant technology breakthrough.
Ken’s design enables all 220 processor cores to be individually programmable and operate together with minimal degradation in performance.
In this excerpt, Ed, who teamed up with Ken in 2024 to found and lead Apitronix, explains how they plan to scale up from two cores implemented on an FPGA (field-programmable gate array - basically a configurable and programmable off-the-shelf chip) to a 220-core prototype Cerebellum chip early next year.
Spoiler alert! As Ed puts it, “it’s more or less cut and paste - it’s not rocket science”!
You can listen to the full BritChips audio podcast ‘Scaling to 200’ on Substack or by searching for ‘BritChips’ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
All BritChips video clips are also available on the YouTube BritChips channel.
