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Limited by high patent threshold, ecological threshold and other factors, general GPU IP has not performed well in the field of graphics processing. Although ARM launched the Mali series, its market impact is obviously insufficient compared with the CPU Cortex series of ARM. Recently, Imagination released a new generation of GPU IP product DXT series for the mobile market, some of which use RISC-V. Other manufacturers are also trying to launch GPU IP. All these conditions indicate that RISC-V has begun to enter the GPU circuit, and whether it can achieve greater success deserves the attention of the industry.

**RISC-V Explore GPU Track**

In the middle of 2022, Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International Foundation, disclosed that the shipment of RISC-V architecture chips had exceeded 10 billion, and it took only 12 years to complete the 30-year development process of traditional architecture. At present, RISC-V is actively expanding to the high-performance field. In the form of artificial intelligence, data center, auto electronics and other products, people can already see RISC-V, which shows that the development of RISC-V is accelerating significantly.

Recently, Imagination, a mobile graphics processor IP provider, released DXT series products, of which the high configuration DXT72-2304 RT3 GPU has 50% performance and computing power increase, and the AI reasoning ability of up to 9TB, supports the open source instruction set architecture RISC-V, and has configurable, scalable and other functions. At the end of 2022, Imagination also announced the upgrade to RISC-V senior member, saying that all its GPUs are compatible with RISC-V SoC, enabling users to fully control their heterogeneous designs.

In response, David Harold, chief marketing officer of Imagination, said that the company was very confident in RISC-V and believed that it would bring disruptive and huge changes. At the same time, Imagination is also cooperating with RISC-V-related partners such as SiFi and MD, hoping to sell more GPUs to RISC-V-related buyers, and to have more opportunities to sell more RISC-V products in the future.

In addition to Imagination, other manufacturers are also developing RISC-V-based GPUs. In June 2022, the Greek IP company Think Silicon showed the RISC-V 3D GPU design, which is the first low-power GPU based on RISC-V. Mark Himelstein, chief technology officer of RISC-V International Foundation, announced that the special interest group of RISC-V in 2023 will focus on the expansion of colorimeters and advanced matrix operations. This is an important direction related to GPU.

**Crossing the patent and ecological threshold is the key**

The current RISC-V can be said to be the first to enter the GPU circuit. The industry is also concerned about whether it can achieve better performance in the future. David Harold said that GPU is indeed a very difficult race track. If it were not protected by so many patents, we would not see that there are only a few GPUs in the world. RISC-V will certainly face these difficulties, and it is difficult to overcome these challenges. Only by completely overcoming these challenges can we become a more recognized open source GPU.


Ecology is also an important challenge for RISC-V in its future development. Whether it is x86, ARM, or MIPS, PowerPC and other chip architectures in the early market, it is not only the product performance itself that determines the success or failure of the competition, but also whether it has a rich upper layer of applications and efficient hardware and software cooperation. Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtouge Semiconductor, pointed out that "RISC-V will continue to evolve towards high dominant frequency and high performance. With the emergence of stable hardware, the full stack of software and hardware will become inevitable. At the same time, RISC-V will move towards broader ecological cooperation, and more new models will emerge in commercial cooperation. The software will continue to be rich and the application will continue to be diversified. This is the major trend of RISC-V development in the future."


Then, in the next step, RISC-V manufacturers should actively strengthen the construction of their own industrial ecology to enrich the upper software and applications. Stephen Barton, senior director of technology product management of Imagination, pointed out that "GPU is actually a very complex thing. It is not only open source hardware that can be directly used by everyone, but also the corresponding DDK (device driver suite) And application software. Are these software and DDK developed by companies with the same source of open source hardware? How optimized is it? Can we fully support different interfaces and various Open GL (Open Graphics Library)? These are very complex things. It is not a simple open source. There is still a lot of detailed work to be done and many challenges to be faced. "

David Harold also admitted that there are many IP providers related to RISC-V, but not many can provide GPU IP. For RISC-V, GPU is a relatively new field, which requires the joint efforts of enterprises upstream and downstream of the industrial chain to make breakthroughs. However, Wu Yanjun, chief engineer of the Software Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also stressed: "Although RISC-V is still limited to some fields that do not require high computational power and software ecological richness, its commercial opportunity has come, and its acceleration from this point is amazing in the future."


This article is selected from:中国电子报