RISC-V chip designer Rivos has raised $250 million in series-A funding to bankroll manufacturing of its first accelerator for generative AI and knowledge analytics workloads.
Based in 2021, the California-based startup goals to provide RISC-V-compatible chips able to operating the varieties of huge language fashions powering AI companies like ChatGPT.
Rivos hasn’t mentioned a lot in regards to the chip’s structure, past that it makes use of a mixture of high-performance RISC-V CPUs and an information parallel accelerator (general-purpose computing on graphics processing unit, or GPGPU) that share a typical reminiscence area throughout each DDR and HBM reminiscence, and can be capable of assist workloads requiring terabytes of reminiscence.
It is at the moment not clear what function these RISC-V cores will play within the design. Nevertheless, we suspect they could perform equally to the SiFive cores utilized in at the very least a few of Google’s Tensor Processing Models to handle the {hardware} and preserve its matrix multiplication items busy with numbers to crunch.
Rivos’s chip will apparently be manufactured utilizing TSMC’s 3nm course of tech – the identical utilized by Apple’s newest silicon – and are designed to fit right into a multi-chip Open Compute Undertaking reference server. This tells us the biz thinks its silicon will find yourself within the datacenter.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Rivos CEO Puneet Kumar revealed his outfit was concentrating on “probably smaller installations the place Nvidia would possibly appear to be an overkill from a price perspective.” We have requested the upstart for additional remark and particulars concerning the silicon and its manufacturing timeline.
Moreover, Rivos is engaged on an open software program stack to assist growth of its RISC-V based mostly compute platform. As we have seen with the ramp of Intel and AMD’s personal accelerators, builders will not transfer till they see a mature ecosystem to work with. Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA runtime is already mature and broadly deployed. Others? Not a lot.
Rivos seems to be concentrating on AI functions and databases that may run atop frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, Spark, and PostgreSQL, which permit functions to be recompiled to run on quite a lot of {hardware}.
“The speedy modifications in LLMs and the merger with knowledge analytics stack makes it important that accelerators be straightforward to program and debut, and that knowledge can seamlessly transfer between CPU and accelerator,” Kumar defined in a press release.
Rivos’s early efforts haven’t all the time gone effectively. In early 2022, Apple sued the RISC-V backer, alleging the upstart had poached staff engaged on its A- and M-series system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Final 12 months, Rivos counter-sued Apple, arguing that Cook dinner & Co had used the regulation as an instrument to thwart startups by “illegally proscribing worker mobility.”
Earlier this 12 months, Apple agreed to settle the case, making it far simpler for traders to contemplate Rivos.
Rivos’s series-A funding spherical was led by Matrix Capital Administration, with that outfit’s Romit Shah becoming a member of the board. The chip startup additionally obtained assist from a number of acquainted names together with MediaTek, Intel Capital, and Koch Disruptive Applied sciences.
The funding spherical will allow the startup to tape out its first chip – produce a finalized design for a fab to fabricate – although a timeline for manufacturing wasn’t disclosed. ®
