Samsung may have accidentally revealed that it is developing a RISC-V CPU/accelerator.
The slip-up occurred during a session titled “Unlocking the Next 35 Years of HPC and AI Software” at the recent ISC conference, where a slide talking about the Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL) mentioned a “RISC-V CPU/AI accelerator” from Samsung.”
This has sparked speculation about the South Korean tech giant's plans to integrate the RISC-V architecture into its upcoming technologies, specifically its Mach-1 AI accelerator chip, which is expected to arrive in early 2025.
It's actually not the first mention.
Samsung is a board member of the UXL Foundation, as are Arm, Qualcomm, Intel and Google Cloud. UXL develops software aimed at improving AI accelerators that do not use Nvidia GPUs; in other words, an alternative to Nvidia's CUDA.
The Mach-1 is reportedly a “lightweight” AI chip that uses low-power (LP) memory instead of the expensive HBM typically used in AI semiconductors. Naver, the South Korean equivalent of Google, signed a 1 trillion won ($750 million) deal with Samsung for Mach-1 chips.
RISC-V, an open-standard instruction set architecture, is rapidly gaining traction as it allows any developer to build their own processors without costly licensing fees. Details on the capabilities of Samsung's RISC-V CPU remain scarce, but HPC cable speculates that the CPU “could be a low-performance RISC-V processor on Samsung's memory-based chip to execute specific tasks defined by the software kit's functions.” That would fit with what we know about Mach-1 and make sense since RISC-V doesn't offer the same performance as Intel's x86 chips.
Several hardware manufacturers, including Apple and Nvidia, already use RISC-V microcontrollers in their products, and countries such as Europe, China and Russia are developing their own sovereign chips based on RISC-V CPUs as part of a broad industrial trend toward diversification and independence of proprietary technologies.
A little digging reveals that Samsung has already referenced the existence of a RISC-V CPU/accelerator. In a Linux Foundation webinar a month ago, again about the UXL Foundation, it also appeared on a slide.
