
RISC-V Spins into Drives, AI - rbanffy
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332658&_mc=sm_eet_editor_rickmerritt
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microcolonel
> _A compiler team already wrote a shader compiler to run high-end graphics
> jobs on its chips._

All major shader ISAs today are RISCé (no new VLIWs, that I'm aware), and this
sentence seems to prove that RISC-V is a viable (base) ISA for shader cores.

> _Ditzel designed server processors at the former Sun Microsystems and
> startup Transmeta before doing a relatively short stint at Intel._

The CEO of Esperanto Technologies worked at a company which built a product on
Dynamic Binary Translation from x86. Can anyone guess what else might be
cooking in that _compiler team_? :- )

I mused earlier today that I'd like to put a RISC-V SBC in an old ThinkPad
chassis.

Maybe ET-Minion is GPU-like enough to stand in for a GPU on a workstation, and
maybe ET-Maxion would make a good host CPU for that. Set the voltages and
frequencies right, and you might be able to put them both in a 2011-era
laptop, built to supply and dissipate 35W of load at times.

Just a thought.

~~~
rbanffy
Is there any RISC-V SBC in the same class as, say, a Raspberry Pi? I've seen
some SoCs more targeted at Cortex-M0 and low-end Quark spaces.

~~~
microcolonel
I'm not sure, I'm hoping that there will be a dev board for the SiFive U500
range; though if there is one, chances are it will not have an integrated GPU.
Though, if we're talking desktop use cases, you _could_ use the PCIe 3.0 bus
to add one, if that's what you're looking for. I think we're still probably at
least a year off from the first RISC-V SBC with an application processor and a
GPU on it.

~~~
rbanffy
It'd be nice to have at least a decent frame buffer. I'm a retrogeek, but
VT100 terminals are getting hard to get ;-)

~~~
microcolonel
I looked at the announcements, and it looks like SiFive will have something
called "HiFive Unleashed" coming out in Q1, sooner than I thought. It looks
like a U500 board with an HDMI port (and USB ports) attached through an FPGA.
So you could even get somewhat (2d) accelerated framebuffer probably with a
little bit of fiddling on the FPGA, not sure what kind of resolutions you
could get out of the HDMI with an FPGA-based CRTC though. :- )

