RISC-V Startup Esperanto Technologies Samples First AI Silicon

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Select customers are now evaluating the chip; early results look promising across a broad range of AI workloads

www.forbes.com, Apr. 20, 2022 – 

Esperanto has been talking about their edge AI chips for several years, and now the company can demonstrate working AI acceleration for image, language, and recommendation processing. I had the chance to watch a demo of the platform and came away quite impressed with the performance and power efficiency of the RISC-V based platform. I was also pleased to see that the Esperanto device is not a one-trick pony, as the team demonstrated Resnet50, DLRM, and and the Transformer network underlying BERT.

As it stands now, the chip is only running as a single accelerator; additional tuning and engineering should increase frequency substantially and will extend the fabric to other chips for larger networks and more throughput. I can't share the benchmark results just yet, but the performance was rock solid in all three models while only sipping power. At full frequency we should expect a 20 watt power envelope.

The Esperanto chip, which we covered here, has nearly 1100 power efficient RISC-V cores that have been extended by Esperanto with vector and tensor operations for AI. "On one 7nm chip," said Founder Dave Ditzel, "we put 1,088 energy-efficient ET-Minion RISC-V processors, each with its own vector/tensor unit; four high-performance ET-Maxion RISC-V processors; over 160 million bytes of on-chip SRAM; and interfaces for external DRAM and flash memory.

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