Think Silicon Shows Off First RISC-V 3D GPU

[coder]

really appreciated, i think from quick-reading the comments here you make, you and others reaaaaalllly get how much frickin work is involved. we're coming up to four (4!) years just for the Specification alone https://libre-soc.org/openpower/sv/ and the binutils upstream patches have only just been submitted over the past couple of months.

Absolutely! 20 years ago, I worked with a small team of hardware designers to who made a programmable ASIC with a core simpler than yours, and it took these industry veterans years to do the job. And even after 2-3 respins, my firmware team was still left with plenty of hardware bugs to work around!

his vision is to see the entire project be FOSS. the RISC-V Foundation undermined his initiative

That's sad to hear.

ThinkSilicon received EU Funding to develop their secretive and proprietary solution, and was bought by a U.S. company. no source code or specifications are publicly available.

I noticed the acquisition by Applied Materials, in 2020. AFAIK, they mostly produce hardware for semiconductor fabs? I guess they wanted to dip into the IP licensing end of the business, as well.

it's just a real pity that they'll be in the same category as PowerVR: proprietary drivers, proprietary silicon

LOL, no... that would put them behind PowerVR!

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...PowerVR-Vulkan

I think Imagination realized that many of the customers they're now courting value open source drivers more than the typical phone/tablet customers they had from before. As long as ARM's Mali drivers remain closed source, it's a selling point if theirs aren't.