Think Silicon Shows Off First RISC-V 3D GPU

At the Embedded World conference happening this week in Nürnberg, Think Silicon is showing off the first production RISC-V 3D GPU design.

The Think Silicon NEOX G-Series and A-Series are their first RISC-V based low-power GPU designs. In Think Silicon's press release announcing the demonstration at Embedded World, they explain:

NEOX™| G (graphics) & A (deep learning accelerator) Series IP represent a new era of smart GPU architectures with programable compute shaders running on a real-time operating system (RTOS) and supported by light-weight graphics and machine learning frameworks. The heavily multi-threaded system can be easily customized for graphics, machine learning, vision/video processing, and general-purpose compute workloads through configurable programming libraries using the same hardware blocks. The new offering serves as a GPU platform to be implemented in 32-bit SoCs addressing a myriad of applications including next-generation smartwatches, augmented reality (AR) eyewear, video for surveillance and entertainment, and smart displays for point-of-sale/point-of-interaction terminals. NEOX™ IP pre-evaluation systems are available for customer testing and Think Silicon will be demonstrating 3D/2D graphics and machine learning applications at Embedded World.

Think Silicon NEOX

Their product page on the NEOX RISC-V GPU IP goes on to detail:

NEOX™ is a parallel multicore and multithreaded GPU architecture based on the RISC-V RV64C ISA instruction set with adaptive NoC. The number of cores varies from 4 to 64 organized in 1-16 cluster elements, each configured for cache sizes and thread counts . Depending on cluster / core configuration, NEOX™ compute power is ranging from 12.8 to 409.6 GFLOPS at 800MHz with support for FP16, FP32 and optionally FP64 and SIMD instructions.

Longtime Phoronix readers may recall the community-based "Libre RISC-V" GPU effort that wanted to come up with a RISC-V-based GPU SoC. But now that effort is known as Libre-SoC and they are working on using the OpenPOWER ISA. That effort remains a work in progress and is not nearly as ready as Think Silicon's NEOX GPU commercial IP.