RISC-V in AI and HPC Part 2: Per Aspera Ad Astra?

By Anton Shilov, EETimes (January 13, 2025)

—Second in a three-part series. You can read the first article here

While there are hundreds of companies that adopt Arm technology, not many of them develop their own custom cores. Something similar will likely happen in the case of RISC-V: companies that need a very specific core and control of their firmware and software stack will be more inclined to design a core from scratch.

For example, Seagate and Western Digital use custom RISC-V cores for their storage controllers. Companies that need to run a lot of off-the-shelf software will prefer off-the-shelf cores or even Arm or x86 CPUs.

“Designing your own core can make sense in certain niche/edge cases,” Ian Ferguson, senior director at SiFive, told EE Times. “At a high level, this is driven by whether you need to customize instructions or have a specific design to own the entire software stack for competitive differentiation reasons.”

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