New RISC-V microprocessor can run CPU, GPU, and NPU workloads simultaneously

X-Silicon Inc. (XSi) has created a model new RISC-V microprocessing chip construction that mixes a RISC-V CPU core with vector capabilities and GPU acceleration proper right into a single chip. The CPU/GPU hybrid chip is open-standard and may reportedly be open-source as properly, Jon Peddie Research reports, and it’s designed to take care of various fully totally different capabilities, along with AI, which devoted CPUs and GPUs would normally take care of. The catch is that it’s alleged to do all this in a way more surroundings pleasant methodology.

The model new CPU/GPU hybrid is designed as a “jack of all trades” processor. In accordance with JPR, the commerce has been in the hunt for an open-standard GPU that’s versatile and scalable enough to assist various markets, along with digital actuality, vehicles, and IoT devices. This new RISC-V CPU/GPU targets to resolve this topic by providing producers with a single open chip design that will take care of any desired workload.

X-Silicon’s chip will not be like totally different architectures, as its design combines the capabilities of a CPU and GPU proper right into a single-core construction. This isn’t just like the on a regular basis designs from Intel and AMD the place there are separate CPU cores and GPU cores. Instead, the core itself is designed to take care of every CPU and GPU duties. In that sense, it sounds a bit like Intel’s abandoned Larabee enterprise, which tried to utilize x86 for graphics and totally different workloads.

The chip makes use of X-Silicon’s C-GPU architecture that merges GPU acceleration proper right into a RISC-V vector CPU core. The construction has a RISC-V vector core with a 32-bit FPU and Scaler ALU. It incorporates a Thread Scheduler, Clipping Engine, Rasterizer, Texture Unit, Neural Engine, and Pixel Processor. The chip is supposed to take care of capabilities along with AI, high-performance computing (HPC), geometry computing, along with 2D and 3D graphics. 

In thought, the facility of X-Silicon’s hybrid chip to take care of CPU and GPU code within the equivalent core affords it many advantages. The chip makes use of the open-standard RISC-V ISA for CPU and GPU, working a single instruction stream. This provides low-memory footprint execution and better effectivity, as there is no copying of data between the CPU memory space and GPU memory space.

The CPU/GPU cores might be meshed collectively proper right into a muti-core design, enabling producers to scale up processing vitality as wished. In a multi-core format, plenty of cores are tiled all through a chip and linked using a speedy materials. Fast on-chip SRAM or eDRAM caches are moreover carried out on this design, and these perform an L2 cache that will combination data from plenty of cores. Each core might be scheduled to run graphics, AI, video, physics, HPC, or totally different workloads independently of the other cores as wished.

With this design, X-Silicon’s C-GPU construction can most likely run any form of CPU or GPU workload. X-Silicon claims to already have the Vulkan graphics API working with “fused GPU acceleration.” This might drastically help with its enchancment and adoption on Android devices.

Because the model new design depends on RISC-V, anyone can take advantage of the construction with out having to pay instruction-set royalty prices — not like x86 and ARM. If it actually works as supposed, the chips would possibly shake up the microprocessor commerce. The same old designs for the time being used are, in thought, not as versatile or succesful as what X-Silicon claims to have created.

Whether or not or not all of it really works as properly in observe as a result of it does on paper stays to be seen, though we’d not must attend prolonged to go looking out out. Software program program enchancment kits will reportedly be launched to early companions sometime this 12 months.