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It looks like SiFive is making a vector processor, to potentially compete with GPUs (Nvidia makes chips with dozens of multiprocessors on them, each with arbitrarily many cores)

Super exciting!

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I’m getting confused. You mention this is a product to eventually compete with GPUs. So is this a quasi-gpu that’s being announced? Will there be a opengl or vulkan driver to interface with it? Is this a regular accelerator? Your comment does not add much clarity.

If it is in fact a CPU designed to be used like a GPU, that’d be very akin to Intel’s (dead) Project Larabee.[0] As I understand it, it was supposed to be a GPGPU[a] that internally was just an x86-64 processor with massive vector units. So, in theory, one could offload practically an entire game onto a Larabee card (save for IO probably) and do computations there. Compare that to a GPU where computations must be sent back and forth between the CPU and GPU.

Linus Sebastion (of LinusTechTips) managed to get his hands on one and made a video on it.[1] It’s been a while since I’ve seen the video, but, IIRC, they weren’t able to get it to work, so the video was a bit of a letdown.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-1fAVU1OQ

[a]: general purpose GPU

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