publicação cruzada de: https://lemmy.eco.br/post/5209379
RISC-V seems to be gaining more traction and more space in the media.
publicação cruzada de: https://lemmy.eco.br/post/5209379
RISC-V seems to be gaining more traction and more space in the media.
Sounds like wishful thinking to me. How is RISC-V stacking up to competitor architectures nowadays performance-wise? Last time I checked they were seriously lagging behind. Wouldn’t recent AI developments (constantly requiring more computing power) be especially something that would hinder RISC-V taking off in the next couple of years?
The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.
The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.
But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.
I think the appeal is that you probably don’t need a huge CPU for a lot of workloads-- just something to run an OS, handle talking to the outside world, and configure the GPU/NPU complexes.
I could imagine a something like a Quadro card that had a small RISC-V core built in as a freestanding device, no motherboard needed. Even if the CPU ran like a Core 2 Duo, that would be sufficient for purpose, but it will be a lot easier to license an appropriate RISC-V core than an x86 one.
If you read the story again: the main message is that industry loves RISC V. Period. AI is only a side topic.