Numerous tech companies are experimenting with RISC-V, the open source, unlicensed and open to all ISA developed at the University of California at Berkeley. The RISC-V ecosystem is made up of a large group of small companies, including SiFive, but also large companies such as NVIDIA and Western Digital that use RISC-V controllers in various products.
He also seems to want to join the latter together AMD. One job advertisement appeared on the research company’s website a figure to be integrated into the RTG group (Radeon Technologies Group) which has capabilities in the development of compilers for an unspecified RISC-V CPU.
The announcement does not enter into the merits of the projects that are boiling in the pot, but it suggests that AMD wants use RISC-V to develop a chip dedicated to the management of certain operations on board its video cards / accelerators, from security to the sorting of operations up to interfacing with other external components. NVIDIA does the same thing with the “Falcon” chip (also known as GSP, GPU System Processor) and the job announcement does not seem to describe AMD’s willingness to make a standalone CPU.
All that remains is to wait for more details, but since great revolutions start from small things, it cannot be excluded that AMD’s interest in RISC-V will lead to something more structured in the future. In fact, it should not be forgotten that AMD’s “semi-custom” business designs solutions for third parties, so in the near future the company could decide to develop a know-how on RISC-V to be resold to potential partners.