RISC-V Is The King of Heterogenous Computing

As specialized hardware becomes more important on all computing platforms RISC-V will establish dominance.

The world of computing is transitioning from homogenous computing to heterogenous computing. What does that even mean?

Homogenous computing means you got a bunch of general purpose CPUs which you duplicate several times over to do most of your work. Heterogenous computer means you use a lot of specialized hardware to do a lot of tasks.

GPUs is already an example of this. They do a lot of graphics related work, image processing and even machine learning tasks which regular CPUs are not well suited for.

However this trend is only accelerating. Apple’s M1 processor is a good example of this. It does machine learning, encryption/decryption, video encoding/decoding and image processing with specialized hardware.

Architectures such as x86 and ARM have only been designed for the general purpose homogenous part. All the co-processor and accelerators which are becoming increasingly important have all rather arbitrarily chosen ISAs.

RISC-V is able to unify all this different type of hardware under one umbrella. You can create systems on a chip made up of different kinds of RISC-V processor implementing different RISC-V extensions all depending on what they are optimized for.