EPI: Europe's microprocessor project

Europe is preparing a great project, it is called EPI (European Processor Initiative), to create a high-performance microprocessor to avoid technological dependence on the United States. An extremely necessary idea considering the current situation and the blockades that the United States has imposed on China. Europe needs great collaborative projects between its members like this one.

We have a high dependence on technology foreign and in the face of certain tricks of politicians or geopolitics, we cannot stand idly by or kneel before the powers. With EPI we will have a future microprocessor with a large amount of investment for its development and with the participation of 10 European countries, including Spain, Sweden, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, etc.

Specifically, of Spain two important members participate, a company specialized in semiconductor device designs and the supercomputing center located in Barcelona. That is, the home of the Marenostrum supercomputer that we have already talked about on several occasions. All together they will work to create a high performance and energy efficient chip.

With it they will be able to create future exa-scale supercomputers (EFLOPS), and also extend it to other applications. And for this, and this is what this blog has to do, they will be based on an open ISA, the RISC-V of which we have also talked on other occasions in LxA. In this way, we will not depend on chips from Intel (Xeon), AMD (EPYC), Oracle (SPARC), IBM (POWER), etc., and who knows if in the future also for consumer computing. Can you imagine a 100% European PC? Hopefully one day.

Summarizing the EPI project, it would have the following key points:

• Create a high-performance, general-purpose processor.
• May be used in supercomputing in 2023, but it is also working to obtain processors for consumer systems, low consumption devices, automobiles, etc.
• Based on a solid economic system and prolonged in time.

Undoubtedly another great news that has caught us almost by surprise after huawei problems and the technological blockade due to the war between the United States and China. When it begins to bear more fruit and we know more news, we will tell it.