The activity around creating a legit graphics processor for RISC-V chip designs, an emerging competitor to x86 and ARM, is gaining steam. Special interest groups at RISC-V next year will expand the focus on extensions for shaders and advanced matrix operations, which is important for artificial intelligence and machine learning, Mark Himelstein, chief technology officer at RISC-V, told The Register. RISC-V International, which developed the instruction set architecture, has interest groups develop extensions that users can add to their chip designs. In 2021, 16 RISC-V extensions were ratified, Himelstein said, and that number will grow next year. Many new extensions were part of mainstream computing chips announced this year at the RISC-V Summit.

Calista Redmond, chief executive of the microprocessor consortium RISC-V International, is a fan of the wild days of chip competition back in the 1980s. "This is the biggest opportunity to change the trajectory of computing and hardware that history has seen since the 80s, and that gets me excited every day," said Redmond in a recent interview with ZDNet via Zoom. She was referring to the flowering in the '80s of numerous different computer chip architectures. They included not only Intel's x86 processors, but IBM's POWER architecture; MIPS-based processors made by companies such as NEC and Toshiba; Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alpha series of processors; Sun's Sparc processors; Motorola's PowerPC series; and Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC series, to name just some of the more obvious chips. Many of these processor families faded over the decades, leaving two main processor camps, x86, and the ARM processors made by the U.K. firm of that name, which is owned by Japan's Softbank Group, and which is being sold to Nvidia.

ZURICH – Dec. 2, 2021 – RISC-V International, a global open hardware standards organization, today announced that RISC-V members have ratified 15 new specifications – representing more than 40 extensions – for the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Most notably, RISC-V members ratified the Vector, Scalar Cryptography, and Hypervisor specifications which will help unlock new opportunities for developers creating RISC-V applications for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), connected and autonomous cars, data centers, and beyond. "In 2021, RISC-V International made huge leaps in our technical progress as we ratified 15 specifications that are critical for the future of computing," said Krste Asanović, Chair of the RISC-V International Board of Directors. "The development of these specifications really showcased the incredible benefits of open collaboration across companies and geographies as members worked together to develop novel approaches for the latest computing requirements." The RISC-V Vector specification will help accelerate the computation of data intensive operations like ML inference for audio, vision, and voice processing.

RISC-V, the emerging open-source instruction set processor architecture, is growing up. Sure, most of the attention has come from hardware hackers playing on RISC-V processors on development boards from companies such as SiFive. But, according to RISC-V CTO Mark Himelstein, RISC-V processors have already found a home in data centers and Alibaba cloud servers. So, it's high time for classes on how to use this new open-source hardware architecture. Then you need to know Linux and open-source software.

If you're buying a PC or server, you've likely considered chips based on x86 or, perhaps less often, the ARM architecture. But like Linux in software, an open-source chip project is out to break the dominance of proprietary chips offered by Intel, AMD, and ARM. The RISC-V open-source architecture, created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010, is open to all who want to use it. The RISC-V design can be modified for PCs, servers, smartphones, wearables, and other devices. A startup called SiFive is the first to make a business out of the RISC-V architecture.