RISC-V developer Ubitium has said it is working on a single chip that can manage them all… that is, combine several major architectures into a single processor.
The universal processor will be based on the RISC-V architecture. The future Ubitium chip is not like the AMD MI300A or NVIDIA Grace Hopper, which combine different cores. The company claims that all transistors in its universal processor can be used for anything — specialized cores will be unnecessary.
«Our universal processor will do everything — CPU, GPU, DSP, FPGA — in one chip, one architecture. This is not an incremental improvement. This is a paradigm shift. This is the processor architecture that the era of artificial intelligence requires»,” says Ubitium CEO Hyun-shin Cho.
In concept, Ubitium’s RISC-V processor is similar to FPGA chips that can be reprogrammed to change functionality. Ubititum says the universal processor will be «smaller, more energy efficient, and significantly cheaper than». The developers are several semiconductor industry veterans who have worked for Intel, NVIDIA, and Texas Instruments, as well as smaller chipmaking firms.
So far, the Ubitium team has not had sufficient funding. The company has raised $3.7 million, which will be used to develop prototypes and create development kits before the as-yet-unknown launch date of the universal processor in 2026. With only $3.7 million, Ubitium will be able to use hardware description languages such as Verilog to develop its architecture and potentially emulate it with FPGAs. But at some point, the startup will need more financial support.
Ubitium aims to develop a «complete portfolio of chips that differ in array size but share the same microarchitecture and software stack». These chips will cover niches from compact embedded devices to high-performance computing systems.
This isn’t the first startup in 2024 to claim to transform the semiconductor industry with just a few million dollars. Earlier this year, Flow Computing announced that it was working on a parallel processing unit (PPU) that could increase the performance of processors by a hundred times with the appropriate software. However, Flow’s PPU is very similar to a graphics processor.
Sources: Tom’s Hardware, Ubitium