Modders and hackers are always attracting attention with unusual projects, but few have gone as far as Matthias Balwierz in his most recent venture. The modder, better known as Bitluni, showed on his YouTube channel how he transformed 8,192 RISC-V microcontrollers into a GPU, which also acts as a low-resolution display.
Each microcontroller in the design acts as a GPU core, so effectively Bitluni has made a homemade 8,192-core graphics card. And each of them received an RGB LED for the video panel effect, with the very low resolution of 16 x 32.
The final product, as shown in the video, is a kind of disk with 16 “plates”, each with 512 RISC-V microcontrollers, aligned 32 vertically and 16 horizontally. If the structure itself doesn’t seem very practical, the energy it needs to operate is even less: 2,161W.
The modder used a Corsair WS3000 ATX power supply to power the system, which offers up to 3,000W. The controllers chosen were the 32-bit QingKe CH570, and each “board” is controlled by a more advanced CH32V unit, also RISC-V.
Plans for homegrown RISC-V-based GPU go even further
Obviously the project in question is very far from serving as a GPU for practical everyday use. In microcontrollers alone, the expense already exceeds US$8,000, more than enough to buy a traditional video card, even at current inflated costs.
Read more:
- NVIDIA announces that it will make CUDA compatible with RISC-V
- Ubitium promises “universal processor”, which acts as a CPU or GPU at the same time
- Modder uses Nintendo Switch to speed up 3D printer by up to 90%
But Bitluni has ambitions to go even further with its homegrown GPU made from RISC-V. The initial idea is to insert a total of 64,000 microcontrollers into the system, for a final resolution of 320 x 200 – something closer to what the first PCs offered.
The creator also planned an acrylic structure for an immersion cooling system, but for now has not taken this part of the idea further due to concerns about cost and pollution.
Via: Tom’s Hardware
Source: www.adrenaline.com.br
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