Esperanto Technologies has ambitious plans for its next RISC-V processor: to undo the accelerator model and build a chip that has both CPU and GPU capabilities for machine learning and high-performance computing.

“X86 is just too heavyweight to serve as both main CPU. The accelerators and the GPUs are just too hard to program and they can’t really serve as your main CPU, right? RISC-V really has the ability to do both things,” said Dave Ditzel, CEO of Esperanto, which designs RISC-V processors, during a presentation at last month’s RISC-V Summit held in Barcelona, Spain.

Ditzel also shared some details about its next-generation chip that he hopes would serve that purpose: do double-precision computing for HPC, and lower-precision computations for machine learning applications.

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