One of the clear moves that we will see in the years to come if the ARM purchase is executed by NVIDIA is going to be the attempt to market gaming PCs with ARM processors connected via NVLink to GPUs in the market. NVIDIA RTX 30 architecture. It has led many industry players to consider switching to RISC-V by putting ARM aside. But RISC-V despite its totally free and open nature is not an architecture that is becoming popular for games.
They manage to connect an AMD RX 6700 XT with an ISA RISC-V CPU
The computer scientist René Rebe succeeded in modifying the Linux kernel so that the RISC-V CPU integrated in his HiFive Unmatched Board communicates with an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT.
It took me ten hours to debug and patch the Linux kernel to support the additional requirements of AMD GPUs on RISCV64 and to be able to use the new AMD RX 6700 XT.
To make this possible, Rebe used the HiFive Unmatched, which is a development board with a processor that has the RISC-V register set and instructions. Which is used for software development compatible with said ISA at desktop and server level. Rebe has successfully enabled hardware acceleration in both hardware rendering and video acceleration, this is the first time anyone has successfully synced a gaming GPU with a RISC-V processor
Of course, the CPU bottlenecks the GPU in terms of performance, but the important thing is not the power obtained, but what has been achieved, since it marks a significant change in the adoption of RISC-V .
RISC-V on its way to the supercomputing market?
For years, in supercomputers for a long time, to achieve maximum power, the combination of a CPU for serial code processing and a GPU for parallel processing has been found to be necessary. While Intel, AMD and NVIDIA are developing proprietary platforms where CPU, GPU and the interconnect between them are their own brand and use proprietary technologies. The ability to connect a GPU like the RX 6700 XT to a RISC-V processor opens up the possibility of creating server-level systems that don’t rely on the big three brands.
It is more than clear that the first to want to use RISC-V in the midst of a trade war with the United States in China, let us not forget that they recently introduced a GPU for computing at the level of the latest NVIDIA Tesla and AMD. Instinct. The combination of RISC-V, Linux as an operating system and its dedicated GPU could be the basis for many future supercomputers developed and deployed by China and in countries in its political and commercial orbit.
