HARDWARE – AIPU

Artificial Intelligence Processing Unit (AIPU)

A high-performance, energy-efficient and scalable AI inference chiplet for AI-accelerated HPC.

Lead partner

At a glance

AI inference chiplet

High performance and high energy efficiency, designed to scale.

Digital in-memory computing

Weight storage and compute units interleaved in a dense layout.

Full-precision accumulation

Accumulation in full precision, with minimal loss of neural-network accuracy.

Scales with CMOS

Technology commensurate with CMOS scaling to low lithography nodes.

RISC-V software stack

Complete compiler and software stack based on RISC-V.

What we are building

The AI Processing Unit (AIPU) is DARE’s AI inference chiplet, led by Axelera AI. It is designed for high performance, high energy efficiency and scalability, and builds on Axelera AI’s digital in-memory computing (D-IMC) technology.

Together with the General Purpose Processor (GPP), the AIPU forms a complete System-in-Package: AIPU chiplets handle AI inference, GPP chiplets run classical HPC workloads. A complete compiler and software stack is developed on the RISC-V architecture and Axelera AI’s infrastructure.

Why it matters

AI-accelerated HPC

Speeds up AI within scientific workloads such as weather models, materials discovery, search and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs).

Large models

Built for large-scale neural networks, including generative and foundation models.

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Tested on real applications

Alya and Bettair (air quality), large language models and SuSy (synthetic content detection) are being optimised for GPP + AI.