Remember when Apple filed a lawsuit against chip startup Rivos, alleging that Rivos hired more than 40 former Apple employees in one year to work on competing system-on-chip technology? ). Apple settled that lawsuit in February.
And on Tuesday, Reuters reported that Livos raised “a funding round that will enable the production of the first server chip for artificial intelligence,” which combines CPUs with LLM and AI-accelerated components optimized for data. announced that it had raised $250 million. analysis.
Nvidia will dominate the market share of over 80% of AI chips in 2023. But a number of startups and chip giants have begun launching competing products, including Intel's Gaudi 3 and Meta's inference chips, both announced last week. Although Rivos has been tight-lipped about product details, he has revealed that his company's plans include designing a chip based on his RISC-V architecture. The RISC-V architecture is an open source alternative to architectures from Arm, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices. [U]Touting an open source alternative means Rivos doesn't have to pay license fees to Arm. “RISC-V doesn't have a (large) software ecosystem, so we decided to start a company and build software-defined hardware, much like CUDA did with Nvidia,” Walden said Lip-Bu Tan, founding managing partner of . One of the investors in Catalyst and Rivos.
Meanwhile, there are rumors that former Arm China CEO Allen Wu has formed a new company to develop RISC-V-based chips. tom's hardware write:
Under the controversial leadership of Allen Wu, Zhongzhi Chip is reportedly attracting a notable influx of talent, including a number of former Arm employees, adding to the new company's serious commitment to the chip sector. Shows ambition… [T]The company's operational focus remains partly unclear, with whether it will primarily engage in its own R&D initiatives or with China's Tenstorrent, which develops HPC CPUs and AI processors based on the RISC-V ISA, as an agency. There has been speculation as to whether he will be represented. According to source reports, Zhongzhi Chip has leveraged its connections to form partnerships with several other major global RISC-V chip developers.
