Some chip pioneers from the 1980s are raising the ante in modern chip design with new opportunities provided by artificial intelligence and the open-source RISC-V architecture.
Untether AI, which was co-founded by an analog and mixed signal chip pioneer Martin Snelgrove, released a new AI inferencing chip called Boqueria, which has more than 1,400 optimized RISC-V processors.
That chip will compete with Esperanto’s ET-SoC-1 AI inferencing chip, which has over 1,088 cores, and started sampling earlier this year. Esperanto’s co-founder is Dave Ditzel, who is known for pioneering work on RISC chips, which includes the development of Sun’s SPARC processors.
Tenstorrent is also building a RISC-V chip for AI under the guidance of CTO Jim Keller, who is known for his breakthroughs in mobile and PC chips through stints with Apple, AMD and Intel.