At the end of November, VIA unexpectedly announced to everyone that its "daughter" CenTaur is working on a completely new x86 processor, which the company claims is the first CPU with an integrated AI block. Today, VIA shared the details of the internal architecture of the processor. More specifically, processors, because the mentioned AI blocks turned out to be actually separate 16-core VLIW CPUs with two independent DMA channels for memory access.
In addition to the AI processor, the future CenTaur processor has 8 x86 cores that support all modern instruction sets, including AVX-512; moreover, support for vector extensions promises to be one of the most advanced on the market. The memory controller of the novelty is quad-channel, it supports 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes and some kind of interconnect technology for systems with more than one CPU. The processor will be manufactured using the TSMC 16FFC (16 nm) process technology, the developers are talking about frequencies in the region of 2,5 GHz. The novelty is positioned as a rival to the initial models of Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, as well as the increasingly popular server processors with ARM architecture. Functioning prototypes already exist, but deliveries should be expected in the second half of 2020.
Source: 3dnews.ru