SiFive, which has designed RISC-V CPU cores for various AI chips, is now offering to license the blueprints for its own homegrown full-scale machine learning accelerator.
RISC-V 2024 Update: RISE, AI Accelerators & More
Announced this week, SiFive's Intelligence XM series cluster promises a scalable building block for developing AI chips large and small. The idea is that others can license the RISC-V-based designs to be integrated into processors and system-on-chips — to be placed in products from edge and IoT equipment to data center servers — and hopefully foster more competition between architectures.
Fabless SiFive is no stranger to the AI arena. As we've previously reported, at least some of Google's tensor processing units are already using SiFive's X280 RISC-V CPU cores to handle the machine learning accelerators and keep their matrix multiplication units (MXUs) fed with work and data.
Likewise, John Ronco, SVP and GM of SiFive UK, told The Register that SiFive's RISC-V design also supports the CPU cores found in Tenstorrent's recently revealed Blackhole accelerator, which we looked at in detail on Hot Chips last month.
