A hint at a RISC-V GPU future?
www.tomshardware.com, Sept. 07, 2021 –
RISC-V has been one of the hottest topics in the world of computing, as the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) allows for extensive customization and is easy to understand, besides the whole open-source, license-free benefit. There's even a project that designed a general-purpose GPU based on RISC-V ISA, and now we are witnessing a port of Nvidia's CUDA software library to the Vortex RISC-V GPGPU platform.
Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) represents a unique computing platform and application programming interface (API) that runs on Nvidia's lineup of graphics cards. When applications are coded for CUDA support, whenever a system spots a CUDA-based GPU, it gets massive GPU acceleration of the code.
Today, researchers have examined a way to enable CUDA software toolkit support on a RISC-V GPGPU project called Vortex. The Vortex RISC-V GPGPU aims to provide a full-system RISC-V GPU based on RV32IMF ISA. That means 32-bit cores that can be scaled from 1-core to 32-core GPU designs. It supports OpenCL 1.2 graphics API, and today it got support for some CUDA action as well.