The world’s first fully automated design system for processor chips, based on artificial intelligence technology, “Enlightenment,” was officially released recently. This system can achieve full-process automated design from chip hardware to basic software, meaning it can realize AI-designed chips, and its designs reach the level of human expert manual design in several key metrics. Related research results were recently published on the preprint website arXiv.
Processor chips are hailed as the “crown jewel” of modern technology, with a design process that is complex, precise, and has a high professional threshold. Traditional design heavily relies on experienced expert teams, often requiring hundreds of participants and taking months or even years, with high costs and long cycles. Meanwhile, with the development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and edge computing, the market demand for dedicated processor chips and their basic software adaptation and optimization is growing increasingly. However, the number of professionals in China’s processor chip industry is severely insufficient to meet this growing demand.
In response to this challenge, the National Key Laboratory of Processor Chips at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, launched the “Enlightenment” system. This system, relying on advanced artificial intelligence technologies such as large models, can achieve automatic design of CPUs and automatically configure corresponding operating systems, translation programs, high-performance operator libraries, and other basic software for the chips.
Physical prototype of “Enlightenment 1”
In terms of automatic CPU design, the “Enlightenment” system achieved the world’s first fully automated design of a CPU chip, “Enlightenment 1,” completing all front-end designs of a 32-bit RISC-V CPU within 5 hours, with performance reaching the level of Intel 486, and a scale exceeding 4 million logic gates, with tape-out already completed. Its upgraded version, “Enlightenment 2,” is the world’s first fully automated design of a superscalar processor core, with performance reaching the level of ARM Cortex A53 and a scale expanded to 17 million logic gates.
Performance comparison of “Enlightenment 1” and “Enlightenment 2”
In terms of basic software, the “Enlightenment” system has also achieved significant results. For example, it can automatically generate customized optimized operating system kernel configurations, with performance improved by 25.6% compared to expert manual optimizations; it can achieve automatic program translation between different chips and different programming models, with performance reaching up to twice that of vendor manual optimized operator libraries; it can automatically generate high-performance operators such as matrix multiplication, with performance improvements of 110% and over 15% on RISC-V CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs, respectively.
This research is expected to change the design paradigm of processor chip hardware and software. It can significantly reduce human involvement, improve design efficiency, shorten design cycles, and enable rapid customized design to meet the increasingly diverse chip design needs for specific application scenarios.
Source: Science and Technology Daily, Dai Xiaopei. Images sourced from related public papers.
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