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MIAOW Open Source GPU Debuts At Hot Chips

Posted by timothy on from the does-it-just-purr-along? dept.

alexvoica writes: The first general-purpose graphics processor (GPGPU) now available as open-source RTL was unveiled at the Hot Chips event. Although the GPGPU is in an early and relatively crude stage, it is another piece of an emerging open-source hardware platform, said Karu Sankaralingam, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sankaralingam led the team that designed the Many-core Integrated Accelerator of Wisconsin (MIAOW). A 12-person team developed the MIAOW core in 36 months. Their goal was simply to create a functional GPGPU without setting any specific area, frequency, power or performance goals. The resulting GPGPU uses just 95 instructions and 32 compute units in its current design. It only supports single-precision operations. Students are now adding a graphics pipeline to the design, a job expected to take about six months.

4 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. GPGPU by hsa · · Score: 2

    Isn't the secong G graphics? If graphics pipeline is missing, this is just a multicore CPU..

    1. Re:GPGPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ah the old RISC versus CISC argument again. Graphics is very specialized. Having a stack of relatively simple graphics cores does very helpful things that your average 4 to 8 core CPU just can't, at least not in remotely that speed. Maybe we will eventually have enough cores in an average cpu to somehow make it possible to do the same things. On the bright side it seems CPUs are again fast enough to decode most 1080p video streams without video card assist, so maybe we are not as far as we might otherwise be. I doubt 4k video is going to easily be decoded with today's CPUs, and complex games won't happen.

      Still, it is an interesting idea. Is there some fundamental "core" we can make processors up of that will be great at handling video as well as number crunching, while not being hopelessly complex.

  2. University Project by craighansen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I attended the presentation for this chip, and as multiple audience questioners pointed out, this design hasn't been carefully designed to be clear of patents. As a university project, it's not likely to be an issue, but cribbing from a recent GPU design is not a promising way to get a patent-clear open-source hardware design. It's also not complete, as it's missing graphics-specific functions, such as texture-mapping, and the FPGA implementation had a single processing pipeline. By taking the same instruction set, they made it easier to test and operate their design using AMD's tools. All that being said, it's an impressive start for a small university group, and by enabling operation with instrumentation hooks for measuring dynamic operations, may become useful as benchmarking and measurement tool for GPGPU programs. Just don't expect this to displace commercial designs RealSoonNow.

  3. Nyuzi was first and is better by Theovon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Check out "nyuzi.org". This is a fully functional open source GPU. It's synthesizable Verilog and works already in an FPGA. So not only is it more or less complete, but it also came out before MIAOW.