Ara: A 1 GHz+ Scalable and Energy-Efficient RISC-V Vector Processor

Re:Ara: A 1 GHz+ Scalable and Energy-Efficient RISC-V Vector... by scottlamb on Friday June 07, 2019 @04:36PM (#20128358)

> Ara runs at 1.2 GHz in the typical corner (TT/0.80 V/25 oC), achieving a performance up to 34 DP-GFLOPS. In terms of energy efficiency, Ara achieves up to 67 DP-GFLOPS/W under the same conditions, which is 56% higher than similar vector processors found in literature.

I wonder if it supports vectorized 8-bit multiplies and, if so, what its performance and efficiency is on those.

I've been looking around at AI accelerators a bit recently. They AFAIK only do 8-bit operations and are rated in TOPS (tera-operations-per-second). Google's Coral USB Accelerator (with an Edge TPU chip) claims 4 TOPS, at 2 TOPS/W. The Gyrfalcon Plai Plug (with a SPR2801S chip) claims 5.6 TOPS, at 9.3 TOPS/W. It'd be really exciting to have an open architecture chip match or exceed that. The Kendryte K210 is a RISC-V AI accelerator chip announced recently, but it only claims 0.25 TOPS, or 0.8 TOPS/W.

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Re:Ara: A 1 GHz+ Scalable and Energy-Efficient RISC-V Vector... by bobajeff on Friday June 07, 2019 @06:10PM (#20129067)

Thanks. A lot of people here seem to focus on Computer Graphics I'm also wondering about potential application Machine Learning and Neural Networks.

Like how would it fare against today's FPGAs, DSP, NPU and TPUs?

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