RISC-V's AI champion just scored $693M cash infusion

RISC-V chip designer Tenstorrent has won $693 million of investment – an endorsement of its plans to use the permissively licensed instruction set architecture for workloads like AI. The startup announced the funding on Monday, and named Samsung, AWF Partners, and even Jeff Bezos's investment vehicle as investors. The Santa …

[HuBo]

The new Transputer?

I like Tenstorrent's use case for RISC-V (and also SiFive's XM), where the rather spartan 1W2R arch is implemented in a massively multicore configuration of inexpensive cores, a bit like an army of ants, that together can end up doing impressive computational work (of some type).

It makes me wonder if anyone, for fun or inquiry, is going to spend some joyful holiday time wiring together a whole bunch of Olimex's $1 RISC-V PC boards (that can play Towers of Hanoi), cluster-style, to show what can be done with this tech in the hobby/amateur space (the $1 price is less than half Raspberry Pi Pico 2's price per RV core) ... could be neat!

[3arn0wl]

The disruptive nature of the permissively open RISC-V ISA encourages the prodding of the received orthodoxy, and produces unexpected solutions, like the Universal Processor here : https://www.ubitium.com/press-release-series-seed/

That has to be healthy for the industry, whether other tacks are eventually taken or not.

[Groo The Wanderer]

Anyone who thinks RISC-V is going to stick with low-power devices and remain non-performant is sadly mistaken. It will eventually be fully on par with every other architecture out there; it's just a matter of time.

[Anonymous Coward]

The exact ISA doesn't really matter anymore.

The compiler converts your code into "some format" that gets read into the CPU and the first layer reinterprets it completely with a huge lookup table before sending it off to lots of transistors. If you look at it that way, the smarts are mostly in the compiler...

[Groo The Wanderer]

Re: The exact ISA doesn't really matter anymore.

Intel tried to make that a reality, didn't they? A wee something nicknamed "The Itanic".