RISC-V: THE CORNERSTONE ISA FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF HPC INFRASTRUCTURES

RISC-V is unique, even revolutionary, because it is a free, open-source ISA to which software can be ported, hardware can be developed, and processors can be built without the cost of licensing proprietary ISAs and/or paying royalties.
The current rise of RISC-V coincides with the slowing of Moore’s Law, meaning that increases in total processing power no longer comes along with new fabrication technologies, with the explosive growth in machine learning and AI applications, demanding massive increases in processing power, and with the growing availability in the market of chips designed by different vendors.

There are currently a large number of RISC-V-based hardware products from different companies, and there are a variety of off-the-shelf, low-cost development boards as well as boards suitable for compute-intensive applications running standard Linux. The freedom to conflgure and customize the RISC-V ISA in accordance with the applications’ needs, including custom instructions, is one of its strongest appeals of RISC-V for compute-intensive applications, making the RISC-V ISA an attractive choice for an unprecedented number of use cases in HPC and AI, loT, Virtual/Augmented Reality. The future will see an explosion of applications that are designed for RISC-V.