Groundbreaking RISC-V Chip Combines CPU, GPU, And AI Capabilities Into One Core

RISC-V is a budding new ecosystem, and a new chip that combines CPU, GPU, and AI capabilities into one core is shaping up to be very interesting.

Source: Siemens

Key Takeaways

RISC-V is an open, low-power ISA that could revolutionize computing, with X-Silicon leading the charge with a new CPU-GPU core.
X-Silicon’s unique chip architecture promises improved efficiency, lower power consumption, and AI acceleration in a single hardware.
While X-Silicon’s new offering sounds promising, it remains to be seen if this CPU-GPU architecture will truly deliver as expected.

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture that is most frequently positioned as a competitor to Arm. It’s low power, it’s aimed at smaller devices, and it’s completely open for anyone to use and implement. That openness has led to concerns surrounding fragmentation, but by and large, the RISC-V community is pretty bullish on its capabilities. Now, X-Silicon has announced that it has created a new “C-GPU,” which is a CPU core with GPU capabilities.

As reported by Jon Peddie (via Toms Hardware) this new RISC-V core is capable of combining GPU acceleration with a CPU core. It uses a CPU-with-GPU RISC-V ISA, and the NanoTile architecture enables AI acceleration as well in the same hardware. The chip is designed to be a versatile workhorse, capable of handling diverse workloads, and can lead to improved efficiency, lower power consumption, and reduced heat generation.

What is RISC-V?

RISC-V is one of the latest contenders in the CPU arena, but what is it and how does it compare to its rivals?

What is X-Silicon?

I hadn’t heard of them either

X-Silicon C-GPU (Source: X-Silicon)

X-Silicon is a company made up of ex-Silicon Valley engineers, founded in San Diego in 2022. Those engineers primarily come from AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, ATI Technologies, and Dell, and they set about reinventing a GPU shader core. What sets this chip apart is its unique architecture, which allows it to run both CPU and GPU code independently within the same core. This means that the chip can execute tasks with a low memory footprint, directly access hardware registers, and operate with high performance while consuming less power.

In this case, X-Silicon claims that it already has Vulkan support working, facilitating support for Android specifically. X-Silicon is looking to start providing Software Development Kits (SDKs) to partners later this year, though it’s unclear who those partners are or when we will see products begin to hit the market. This is still very early on in RISC-V’s development, and the cost of development still makes it prohibitively expensive to many companies looking to mass-produce consumer-focused devices.

As it stands, what X-Silicon has created is theoretically an improvement over the chip architectures that we use currently, though if it truly is remains to be seen. In theory, a fused CPU and GPU architecture is superior to what we have currently, as it means that any data shared between CPU and GPU can be operated on at the same time without a need for data to go back to memory. However, in practice, we have no idea how something like this can and will function.

We’ll be waiting to see what comes of this particular chip, but it certainly sounds promising. There’s a lot of good to be said for the RISC-V ecosystem, and with more hardware being launched every single day, it’s very possible that we may soon see consumer devices launch that are powered by this architecture, too.