from Hacker News

RISC-V AI Chips Will Be Everywhere (2022)

by mtmk on 7/8/24, 1:37 AM with 19 comments

• by LarsDu88 on 7/10/24, 8:55 PM

  RISC-V is mostly a hedge against ARM at this point IMO.

  Part of the strategy of commoditizing your complement: https://gwern.net/complement

  Similar thing going on right now with the rampant open sourcing of LLMs

• by What2159 on 7/10/24, 9:07 PM

  RISC-V has the budget of China behind it so essentially all the money.

• by lizknope on 7/10/24, 9:39 PM

  Most people don't realize that most chips have more processors than just the main CPU cluster. The PCIE and DDR PHYs often have tiny low end CPU cores used for things like link training. There may be 10 of those CPU cores and these are the kinds of things that are being replaced by RISC-V. You don't need a fast CPU for this stuff.

  Eventually RISC-V may have CPU cores fast enough to compete with high end ARM and x86 cores but it will take a while and incentive from the chip companies to design those high performance RISC-V cores. Some of that incentive may come from ARM raising license fees.

• by Incipient on 7/11/24, 6:58 AM

  Feels like the main driver for RISC-V being successful (in the mid-long term) will be China and if they want to dump mega billions into pushing out western architectures.

  Short term we won't see it "everywhere". Without a powerhouse to push it, I find it hard to see/say if it'll be able to catch up or what that'll look like (see Linux example).

• by Cyberdog on 7/10/24, 8:50 PM

  I don't know. It feels to me at this point like the RISC-V revolution and the year of Linux on the desktop will happen at around the same time.