AMD Job Posting Hints at Embedded RISC-V CPUs

In order to expand its existing team of architects working on embedded RISC-V CPUs, AMD’s Radeon Technology Group (RTG) is looking to hire an expert in RISC-V CPU/GPU architecture. Radeon Technologies Group is hiring specialists, which could provide an indication of the applications that the company is working on, according to a new job posting. AMD is well underway in the development of RISC-V-based solutions, according to a new job posting.

AMD’s expectations of its RISC-V micro-architect/RTL designer are laid out in the job description, which includes some general information. The company is looking for a specialist with knowledge of high-performance GPUs, RISC-V RV64 CPUs, and CPUs that support out-of-order execution, speculative execution, and branch predictors, among other technologies.

A team at AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group in Orlando, Florida is working on embedded RISC-V microprocessors, according to a job advertising on their website. The new applicant would be required to be familiar with and enhance “current and upcoming graphics/compute paradigms and new APIs leveraging RISC-V processors,” according to the position description. In addition, they will need to assess CPU workloads and provide recommendations for improvements, as well as identify bottlenecks and other difficulties where an integrated CPU would increase performance and make recommendations for changes.

Because AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) does not build its own CPUs, it is unlikely that AMD-branded RISC-V CPUs (or licensable RISC-V embedded CPU cores/designs) will be released by RTG. For a variety of tasks, such as managing certain onboard functions for the GPU, modern GPUs could make use of embedded CPUs. These chips could even be expanded to perform more exotic tasks, such as running an operating system or processing general-purpose tasks, such as retrieving data from storage devices. RISC-V architectures have the potential to be utilized for a variety of additional applications, such as security, by offering a hardware-based root of trust.

The type of RISC-V CPU cores being developed by AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group is still unknown, but we do know that Nvidia’s own GPUs employ RISC-V microcontrollers to manage some of the tasks on the GPUs’ boards.

Because the RISC-V open-source architecture is especially well suited for upcoming applications, it’s probable that AMD is developing a new architecture of some sort. Meanwhile, because we are working with a 64-bit RISC-V architecture, we can be rather certain that we are not dealing with a simple microcontroller here.