Architecture may be good for more than cut-rate SoCs and high-volume microcontrollers after all

RISC-V chip designer Tenstorrent has won $693 million of investment – an endorsement of its plans to use the permissively licensed instruction set architecture for workloads like AI.

The startup announced the funding on Monday, and named Samsung, AWF Partners, and even Jeff Bezos's investment vehicle as investors.

The Santa Clara-based AI infrastructure biz, led by semiconductor guru Jim Keller, has been developing AI accelerators based on the RISC-V CPU instruction set architecture (ISA) going back to 2016.

The open nature of the base RISC-V ISA means that anyone can use it royalty free to develop open source or proprietary close source products or intellectual property, which they are then free to share or license.

Since its introduction in 2010, RISC-V has been adopted in microcontrollers and SoCs, as silicon slingers see it as a fine alternative to licensing an off-the-shelf ISA or CPU core from the likes of Arm ...