The RISC-V architecture is gaining momentum in the semiconductor industry. Many companies and researchers are working to make it viable for servers and high-performance computing. China and Europe have announced new high-performance RISC-V chips.
The EU also builds an experimental RISC-V cloud computing environment using open-source software. Chinese organizations plan to release the open-source Xiangshan K100 CPU this year. It runs at 3GHz and claims performance advantages over some ARM server processors.
Researchers from Europe and the U.S. have detailed a 432-core RISC-V chip called Occamy. It has HBM2e memory and a chipset design and is made using the 12-nm process. Nick Brown, a senior research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, said faster RISC-V chips are becoming available.
However, more work is needed in software and hardware to drive architecture adoption in high-performance computing. EU-backed institutions are working on software efforts related to RISC-V. The European Union is funding an initiative called Vitamin V.
Xiangshan’s debut in high-performance computing
It aims to port the software necessary for RISC-V to cloud environments. Researchers want to create an equivalent software toolchain to match ARM and x86 deployments in the cloud.
The cloud development will revolve around developing Kubernetes, Docker, and OpenStack. RISC-V recently published the latest version of a server standard. It allows hardware companies to build barebones servers based on the ISA.
The server platform supports the CXL and PCIe 6.0 interfaces. A study by the Technical University of Munich investigated Tenstorrent’s Grayskull AI chip. It includes RISC-V processors and 120 Tensix cores.
The study found that Grayskull can be more cost-efficient than Nvidia’s H100 GPU in specific computations. RISC-V still faces hurdles, particularly in software development and integration with existing systems. However, advancements like the Xiangshan K100 CPU and Tenstorrent’s Grayskull AI chip show promising potential.
The EU’s Vitamin-V project aims to further close the gap by developing cloud-compatible software tools.
