News Free Open Source GPU Under Development for RISC-V

[Admin]

The RV64X group wants to create a universal RISC-V-based CPU-GPU-VPU core.

Free Open Source GPU Under Development for RISC-V : Read more

 

[hannibal]

Interesting... how do They handle the complex gpu related patents? Do They do everything so differently that no patent royaltes Are needed. That Sounds almost impossible.
If this happens, it could mean huge things to gpu market in the long run! Some company like Xiaomi that now makes low cost phones could produce really cost effective GPUs!
So any extra info about the patent situation would be really usefull.

 

[oceanwaves]

Excellent news ! IMO big Telcos & Networks should take notice : Nokia ,Ericsson, ATT, Verizon, DT, Telefonica , the savings can be huge in new intensive scalable services , the web is just starting to grow , as long as established Media does not break the evolution ahead.

 

[Strontium]

Interesting... how do They handle the complex gpu related patents?

My guess is by the time this is viable at scale those patents will have expired. Patents do not last forever.

 

[hannibal]

Maybe, but do They really wait tens of years to wait the patents to go old? Sounds dubious at best. The patents do get old, but it takes a long time!
There is reason why there Are only two x86 cpu manufacturers... anyone else would get sued to the dead... patent last 20 years and after that those companies make new improvements that get patented, so those GPUs should be always 20 years old technology compared ro competition...

 

[castl3bravo]

I'm assuming whatever Nvidia did in their GPU hardware isn't something the RISC-V folks need to worry about. This is hardware engineering where the only requirement is a modification to Vulkan, DirectX and OpenGL APIs that allows API to interact with their new GPU hardware. Why waste time trying to copy Nvidia's implementation? The patent trolls, I mean lawyers, would love it if your h/w designed copied parts of Nvidia's.

 

[101Force]

Interesting... how do They handle the complex gpu related patents?

The article mentions the Vulkan API, which is open-source, and presumably other open-source APIs such as OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenVG, and AMD's FidelityFX (which includes an open-source DLSS-like API) are being considered. DirectX isn't open-source, but I suspect Microsoft doesn't charge a royalty for hardware DirectX support since that encourages sales of the Windows operating system.

Some company like Xiaomi that now makes low cost phones could produce really cost effective GPUs!

Xiaomi probably already uses OpenGL ES in their products.