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BSC presents Sargantana, the first open-source chips designed in Spain

BSC presents Sargantana, the first open-source chips designed in Spain

Market news |
By Wisse Hettinga

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The third generation of the Lagarto family of processors, designed entirely at BSC, represents a step forward in the development of high-performance European chips

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) presented the new Sargantana chip, the third generation of open source processors designed entirely at the BSC. The development of Sargantana is a crucial step forward in reinforcing BSC’s leading position in RISC-V open source computing technology research in Europe.

Sargantana (the name of the lizard in Aragonese and Catalan) is the third generation of the Lagarto processors, the first open source chips developed in Spain, in the framework of the DRAC project (Designing RISC-V-based Accelerators for next generation Computers), and is one of the most advanced open source chips in Europe at the academic level. The new Sargantana features better performance than its two predecessors – Lagarto Hun (2019) and DVINO (2021) – and is the first processor in the Lagarto family to break the gigahertz barrier in operating frequency.

The fact that the instruction set architecture (ISA) of these new processors is open source, and therefore non-proprietary and accessible to all, reduces technological dependence on large multinational corporations by enabling innovation through the collaboration of companies and institutions without the limitations of proprietary architectures. The RISC-V free hardware architecture, on which these new chips are based, could bring about a technological revolution in the hardware world like Linux did in the software world.

“The launch of Sargantana is a further step forward in the development of European RISC-V based technology, an embryo of the future European high-performance processor. This open hardware will be vital to ensure technological sovereignty and maintain European industrial competitiveness, and consolidates the BSC’s role as a pioneer in Europe in the introduction of open source for chip design,” said BSC director Mateo Valero.

In 2017, the European Union identified the lack of own hardware as one of the main vulnerabilities, due to the risk of industrial espionage posed by an over-reliance on chips designed and produced outside Europe, especially in the United States, Taiwan, China, Japan and South Korea. The BSC was then tasked by the EU to lead the scientific development of future European chips to provide the market with an open and local alternative, suitable for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, the automotive sector and the internet of things.

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