According to Lei Feng, both ordinary consumers and researchers can identify two kinds of waves in recent years. One is that the increase in CPU speed is becoming less and less significant. On the other hand, under the stimulation of deep learning, various semiconductor giants and a group of AI start-ups began to promote their own AI chips.
It is the era of computer computing architecture; new methods, new thinking, new goals have led to a new wave. The two winners of the 2017 Turing Awards, John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, are witnesses and leaders of this new wave. Recently, they published a report in ACM (Communications of the ACM), detailing the changes that have triggered the new era of computer architecture. They also expect the next decade will be the “golden age” in the field of computer architecture.
The first example here is RISC-V, the fifth-generation RISC-V architecture developed by UC Berkeley. Under the management of the RISC-V Foundation, RISC-V has an entire ecosystem that maintains this architecture. Choosing openness allows the ISA to appear in the public, and software and hardware experts can collaborate before making a final decision. One benefit of the open system is that ISAs are rarely expanded for pure marketing reasons, as opposed to proprietary instruction sets that often add instruction sets for marketing.
To read more, please visit: https://www.leiphone.com/news/201902/ENaDygWP1fdd4OrH.html. Please note that the original article is in Chinese.