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. "There is no reason why you could not integrate C-series -- which is the part that has ray tracing -- with RISC-V," David Harold, chief marketing officer at Imagination, told The Register. Andes Technology, which creates RISC-V chip designs, has verified that Imagination's GPUs work with RISC-V, and so has RIOS Lab, which has David Patterson, vice chair of the Board at RISC-V Foundation, on staff. The need for a GPU on RISC-V could be fundamental as the chip architecture gains importance, Shreyas Derashri, vice president of compute at Imagination, told The Register.

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.