www.hpcwire.com, Jun. 19, 2024 –
Samsung may have unintentionally revealed its intent to develop a RISC-V CPU, which a presentation slide showed may be used in an AI chip. The company plans to release an AI accelerator with heavy in-memory processing, but it has been quiet about its upcoming chip.
A slide at the ISC conference mentioned a "RISC-V CPU/AI accelerator from Samsung." It isn't clear if the RISC-V CPU is related to that specific chip or whether Samsung is developing a separate RISC-V processor.
The slide was presented at a session about the UXL Foundation (Unified Acceleration Foundation), which aims to build AI software to support the sales of AI accelerators that aren't Nvidia's GPUs. The AI software will compete against Nvidia's CUDA.
Samsung has extensively discussed in-memory processing. Computing near memory or inside the memory alleviates bandwidth issues for scientific and AI applications. Samsung will reportedly release an upcoming AI accelerator called Mach-1, which Naver (a South Korean internet conglomerate ) has already ordered to the tune of $752 million.
Bongjun Kim, a staff researcher at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, said during the session that LLMs typically require a lot of memory for AI applications, and there are times when GPUs experience underutilization.
"You need to use some processing in-memory to alleviate the memory bandwidth problems," Bongjun said during the ISC session titled "Unlocking the next 35 years of software for HPC and AI," which is available on the web.
He didn't talk specifically about the chip, and there are no additional details on Samsung's RISC-V CPU.
The CPU could be a low-performance RISC-V processor in Samsung's memory-based chip to run specific tasks defined by software kit functions.
RISC-V isn't yet at a stage where it can reliably function as a high-performance CPU. It doesn't offer the performance of a CPU based on Intel's x86 architecture or ARM, and it has poor software support.