Esperanto Unveils ML Chip with Nearly 1,100 RISC-V Cores

At the RISC-V Summit today, Art Swift, CEO of Esperanto Technologies, announced a new, RISC-V based chip aimed at machine learning and containing nearly 1,100 low-power cores based on the open-source RISC-V architecture. Esperanto Technologies, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with other sites across the U.S. and Europe, was created in 2014 "with the goal of making RISC-V the architecture of choice for compute-intensive applications such as AI and machine learning." Swift traced the history of the new chip back to 2017, when Dave Ditzel – the founder and chairman of Esperanto – laid out the vision for Esperanto at the seventh RISC-V workshop. At that workshop, Ditzel set a goal of "laying down 4,000 or more cores on a single device." Ditzel called for both a simple instruction set through RISC-V and innovation in the realms of custom microarchitectures and proprietary low-power design techniques.