San Francisco, CA, June 03, 2024 – Andes Technology, a leading supplier of high-efficiency, low-power 32/64-bit RISC-V processor cores and Founding Premier member of RISC-V International announces that Rain AI, a pioneer in compute-in-memory (CIM) technology, licensed Andes’ AX45MPV RISC-V vector processor. Rain AI designs novel accelerator solutions, and the two companies are collaborating to accelerate Rain AI’s product roadmap.

As the world economy embraces generative AI to deliver unprecedented benefits to consumers and business alike, energy consumption stands as a significant hurdle regardless of the deployment points, be it the cloud, edge, and especially the smallest sensors. CIM represents the most promising solution to lower the energy footprint by as much as 50X. By performing computations directly in the memory bit-cells, CIM can dramatically reduce the energy required for matrix operations commonly found in machine learning.

However, CIM by itself cannot completely address the vast and growing number of machine learning operators. A RISC-V CPU is ideal for efficient programming and future-proofing of an CIM-based NPU.  The RISC-V architecture allows users to add custom instructions to encapsulate the CIM computing blocks, easing software development efforts.  Andes automates this instruction customization process with its automated COPILOT compiler.


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