Second on today’s Hot Chip 2025 CPU track is Pezy Computing, the quirky Japanese CPU development firm who specializes in Multiple Instructions Multiple Data (MIMD) CPU designs.
MIMD is an old concept in CPU design, but it’s not a CPU design we see too much of in the real world. Most designs are variations on Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD). But MIMD has the potential to exceed SIMD in performance by more elegantly handling scenarios with highly independent/diverging threads, where only a small number (if any) threads are using the same instruction at the same time.
This is a 25 minute presentation with roughly 40 slides. So to say things move quickly is an understatement.
PEZY SC4s is being built on TSMC’s 5nm process. A single chip is rather large, at roughly 556mm2 in die size.
Along with their design work, PEZY has also simulated their designs in order to get an idea of what power consumption and performance look like. Compared to their SC3 design, they’re projecting a >2x increase in power efficiency when executing a DGEMM workload.
And in performance simulations, they’re seeing an almost 4x increase in performance with the Smith-Waterman algorithm, which is a genome sequence alignment algorithm.
And work is already underway on designing the 5th generation of PEZY designs. The company is designing PEZY 5 in a 3nm (or smaller) process, with a 2027 release date.
