The semiconductor industry produces various types of processors, but RISC-V startup, Ubitium, claims to be working on a universal architecture that seeks to master them all. 🌍

Emerging from stealth this year, Ubitium has publicly announced the creation of its Universal Processor, which is based on a “workload-independent microarchitecture.”

“Our Universal Processor does it all: CPU, GPU, DSP, FPGA – on a single chip and a single architecture. This isn’t an incremental improvement; it’s a paradigm shift. This is the processor architecture that the AI era demands,” says Ubitium CEO Hyun Shin Cho. 💡

The Universal Processor is based on the RISC-V architecture, which is typically used for CPUs. However, Ubitium's upcoming chip is not like AMD's MI300A or Nvidia's Grace-Hopper Superchip, which combine CPU and GPU chips in a single package. Instead, Ubitium ensures that all transistors of your Universal Processor They are reusable for everything; they don't require "specialized cores" like those found in CPUs and GPUs. 🔄

 Universal RISC-V processor the concept

In concept, Ubitium's RISC-V processor sounds like an FPGA, which can be reprogrammed to change its functionality, also known as hardware emulation. However, while FPGAs tend to fall short compared to chips designed for industrial applications, specific in terms of performance, efficiency and cost, Ubitium assures that the Universal Processor will be “smaller, more energy efficient and significantly less expensive.” ⚡

The developers behind the Ubitium Universal Processor They are a group of semiconductor veterans who worked at companies like Intel, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments, as well as smaller companies like PACT XPP Technologies. Incidentally, PACT, which focuses on FPGAs and parallel computing, has been involved in several patent lawsuits against Intel (twice, in fact) and Xilinx (now part of AMD). ⚖️

Although Ubitium's team is well-talented and experienced, they are still short on funding. So far, the company has raised $3.7 million, which Ubitium says will be used to develop prototypes and create kits development, ahead of the launch of the Universal Processor, which is planned for 2026. 📅

While $$3.7 million isn't small, it's certainly not enough for Ubitium to launch its "revolutionary" chip. It typically takes hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a chip to the tape-out stage, when the first samples are manufactured. With $$3.7 million, Ubitium can use hardware description languages like Verilog to design its architecture, and potentially emulate it using an FPGA for further testing. But at some point, Ubitium will need larger financial backing to launch its Universal Processor. 💰

Even if Ubitium had much more funding, launching in 2026 remains a huge challenge. traditional microarchitectures made Industry titans like AMD, Intel, or Apple can take years to develop; launching an architecture that supposedly “revolutionizes” the industry in just two years would be complicated, to say the least.

Ubitium isn't just working on a single chip, but envisions having "a complete portfolio of chips that vary in die size but share the same microarchitecture and software stack." These chips would range from "small embedded devices" (similar to AMD Ryzen embedded CPUs) to "computing systems that are very small." high performance”, competing with the fastest processors and industry greats. 💻

This isn't the first 2024 chip startup to make promises of transforming the semiconductor industry with just a few million dollars in the bank. Earlier this year, Flow Computing announced it was working on a Parallel Processing Unit, or PPU, that could boost CPU performance by a hundredfold after rewriting the software. However, Flow's PPU sounds a lot like a GPU, just as Ubitium's Universal Processor sounds like an FPGA. 🤔