RISC-V chip designer Rivos has raised $250 million in series-A funding to bankroll manufacturing of its first accelerator for generative AI and information analytics workloads.

Based in 2021, the California-based startup goals to supply RISC-V-compatible chips able to working the varieties of enormous language fashions powering AI companies like ChatGPT.

Rivos hasn’t stated a lot concerning the chip’s structure, past that it makes use of a mix of high-performance RISC-V CPUs and a knowledge parallel accelerator (general-purpose computing on graphics processing unit, or GPGPU) that share a standard reminiscence area throughout each DDR and HBM reminiscence, and can be capable of assist workloads requiring terabytes of reminiscence.

It is at present not clear what function these RISC-V cores will play within the design. Nevertheless, we suspect they might perform equally to the SiFive cores used in a minimum of a few of Google’s Tensor Processing Models to handle the {hardware} and maintain its matrix multiplication models 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 focusing on “doubtlessly smaller installations the place Nvidia may look like an overkill from a value perspective.” We have requested the upstart for additional remark and particulars relating to the silicon and its manufacturing timeline.

Moreover, Rivos is engaged on an open software program stack to assist improvement of its RISC-V primarily based 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 extensively deployed. Others? Not a lot.

Rivos seems to be focusing on AI purposes and databases that may run atop frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, Spark, and PostgreSQL, which permit purposes to be recompiled to run on quite a lot of {hardware}.

“The speedy modifications in LLMs and the merger with information analytics stack makes it very important that accelerators be straightforward to program and debut, and that information can seamlessly transfer between CPU and accelerator,” Kumar defined in a assertion.

Rivos’s early efforts haven’t at all times gone properly. In early 2022, Apple sued the RISC-V backer, alleging the upstart had poached workers engaged on its A- and M-series system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Final yr, Rivos counter-sued Apple, arguing that Prepare dinner & Co had used the regulation as an instrument to thwart startups by “illegally proscribing worker mobility.”

Earlier this yr, 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 acquired 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. ®