DAC 2023: RISC-V is not in the future, it's now

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A snippet of the RISC-V panel discussion at DAC 2023 in San Francisco, with panellists from Intel, OpenHW Group, Imperas, Ventana Micro, Meta, and RISC-V International

www.embedded.com/, Jul. 17, 2023 – 

At this year's Design Automation Conference (DAC), there was a panel discussion entitled, "Delivering on RISC V's Promise to Give Designers Freedom to Innovate – What's Needed?". A key message from the panel is that there's much greater momentum within the ecosystem, and as the CEO of RISC-V International, Calista Redmond, told embedded.com at the conference, "RISC-V is not in the future, and it's a reality now."

As Donkey constantly asks in the movie "Shrek", many of us in the media often ask, "Are we there yet?", referring to the fact that RISC-V is something in the future that's being considered but not being adopted widely. But the message at the DAC panel, which involved Calista Redmond, Bob Brennan from Intel, Rick O'Connor from the OpenHW Group, Simon Davidmann from Imperas, Balaji Baktha from Ventana Micro, and Himanshu Sanghavi from Meta, was that the narrative was well short of reality: the fact is, as several people told us at the conference, there's a strong argument today for anyone involved in system design to have a strategy around RISC-V, whether they contemplate using it or not, they need to have at least gone through the review process.

As if to emphasize this, a recently published technical paper at the 2023 International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) highlighted Meta's use of two RISC-V cores (from Andes Technology) in each of the processing elements of a larger array in its accelerator for deep learning recommendation models (DLRM); the paper indicates that the cores are heavily customized to suit the functionality needed, and a RISC-V vector extension adds extra flexibility.

Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International:

"RISC-V is truly inevitable. We understand there are more than 10 billion cores in market already today and we keep hearing more and more reports that add on to that. Both the market overall and for custom processing continues to grow and expand the number of places and corners and reaches that we're finding processing capability continues to explode. There are many trends that are adding/fueling this, from AI and ML to just basic acceleration. We are trying to do more and use compute capability to do that. The market is there and that drive for custom processing, that drive for differentiation, is why RISC-V is truly inevitable."

"When you're allowed that level of customization, you can really design to the parameters that are important to your workload: power, price, performance, and the unique variables or the workload challenges that you're facing. We do this as a modular approach, rather than incrementally adding everything into the pot. We also have reserved coding space and special extensions like vectors that enable that art of the possible. Enable innovation. And innovation in an open community, rather than controlled and driven by a single entity, really starts to drive that future forward. That competitive innovation spirit that we find in the community, while also fostering a contribution culture."

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