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Abstract

he adoption of RISC-V, a free and opensource computer instruction-set architecture first introduced in 2010, is taking off like a rocket. And much of the fuel for this rocket is coming from demand for AI and machine learning. According to Semico Research Corp., the number of chips that include at least some RISC-V technology will grow 73.6 percent per year to 2027, when there will be some 25 billion AI chips produced, accounting for US $291 billion in revenue.The increase from what was still an upstart idea just a few years ago to today is impressive, but for AI it also represents something of a sea change, says Dave Ditzel. Ditzel's company, Esperanto Technologies, has created the first high-performance RISC-V AI processor intended to compete with powerful GPUsThe ET-SoC-1 packs more than 1,000 RISC-V cores onto a piece of silicon that consumes just 20 watts.