We obtained a PEZY-SC chip designed at PEZY Computing, removed the lid, and tried to peek inside the die.
The PEZY-SC is a 1,024-core many-core processor designed at PEZY Computing.
Each core implements an original instruction set architecture, and there are ARM helper cores in additions to them.
The ARM core stayed unused at the time when I played around with this chip.
The FP-1 chip, pictured next to the PEZY-SC chip, is a previous-generation many-core design at PEZY.
The lid is removed with a razor and thin pre-paid cards.
After removing the lid, we put the chip on fire to remove the die.
The die measures 19.5 mm×21.0 mm for an area of 409.5 mm2.
With the die detached from the package, we put the die in etching chemical to further investigate the structure of the chip.
When the die is put in the etching chemical for too long, it stops being shiny, but you can clearly see four clusters of 32 blocks.
Each of the block has 8 cores for a total of 1,024 cores.
I saw a working configuration of an Exascaler PEZY-SC system at KEK (just to make sure; some say like nobody has ever seen it working
).
The system is the first PEZY-SC system to be listed on the Green500 list.
When I visited them sometime later, the number of chiller was doubled.
