Something to make Arm, Intel and AMD squirm; Nvidia, Qualcomm, Google and Samsung will deliver AI-focused presentations at RISC-V Summit

The recent RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara, California, saw major industry players like Nvidia, Qualcomm, Google, and Samsung deliver presentations focused on AI and the expanding role of the RISC-V architecture.

The involvement of such big name players put a spotlight on the growing momentum behind RISC-V, which is increasingly being seen as viable challenger to proprietary architectures like Arm and x86.

Nvidia, which has used RISC-V in its GPU microcontrollers for nearly a decade, presented a 20-minute keynote titled “One Architecture, Dozens of Applications, Billions of Processors,” presented by its VP of Multimedia Architecture/ASIC, Frans Sijstermans exploring the company has used RISC-V to improve its products, highlighting the architecture’s growing influence in GPU design.

Building new AI accelerators

Having previously announced its long-term commitment to RISC-V, Qualcomm also took to the stage to discuss Sail and other alternative approaches to providing a single source of truth for the RISC-V ISA. The company also participated in a keynote panel on the future of AI and security, alongside Nvidia and others.

Samsung highlighted how it has successfully integrated RISC-V CPUs into its embedded systems, and offered insights on how Samsung Foundry is helping customers innovate with RISC-V. The company also discussed ways it has optimized chip and chiplet performance to create smarter, more efficient systems.

One of the definite highlights of the event was a talk from Google DeepMind’s Cliff Young and Martin Maas, who spoke on the benefits of building new AI accelerators with RISC-V. Google’s TPUs are based on the architecture, and the session covered the…