RISC V AI Accelerators Market Projections Show Rapid Shipment Growth and Increasing Industry Integration Standards
A rapidly emerging market for artificial intelligence accelerators based upon the open source RISC V design is set to take off, according to a new whitepaper issued by technology research firm SHD Group. The study expects volume shipments of these dedicated accelerators to grow by 40.9% on average each year, as this open standard design gains acceptance across the semiconductor industry as a significant competitor to closed source designs owned by the previous major players.
As reported by the SHD Group, worldwide shipments of RISC V based artificial intelligence accelerators in the last year was 1,159,300,000 units. The research company predicts the annual shipment volume for such product will grow to 9,059,000,000 units by 2031. Regarding the overall scenario of the silicon industry, shipments of all silicon chips based on open instruction set will increase from 6,889,000,000 units to 35,972,000,000 units accordingly.
The increasing popularity of RISC V is mainly attributable to its licensing model. As opposed to owned proprietary architectures such as Arm or the Intel x86 platform, this specification enables engineers to create a customized silicon without incurring high cost royalties. This business model enables chip designing companies to personalize the inner workings of the processor to achieve specific performance and power goals.
It is a very good architecture for current era chipsets which all together assemble various silicon Dies originated mainly chiplets, this is officially chiplets terminology. A single substrate design for combining CPUs, GPUs, NPUs represented a very efficient use of an open standard. This architectural openness has driven the big hardware players in engaging with the ecosystem. Nvidia has recently announced plans to run its proprietary CUDA software platform on RISC V hardware and RISC V International is working towards getting formal ISO standards in place.
The long term value of the technology is in its operational independence. Credit analysis by the SHD Group suggests that the core advantages of this open architecture can be boiled down to three separate operational tenants, stating that the inherent value of the technology is defined by independence, flexibility and acceleration
that enables developers to build customized hardware without the legal and financial induced hurdles involved in traditional licensing disputes.
