RISC-V is the fast growing, open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) for processors of all types including CPUs and accelerators. These processors can be utilized for a wide variety of applications with vendors such as Codasip, Axelera and many more creating their own RISC-V processors. The European Union, as part of its European Processor Initiative (EPI), is also looking to create their own microprocessor powered by RISC-V. We’ve long pioneered open ecosystems at Codeplay, and as a member of RISC-V International we’ve been involved with the project for several years, helping to evolve the standard through our working group leadership. We know that open, standards-based hardware is an important step to creating a truly open ecosystem.

But for that to be achieved, we need equally open software, built on top of open hardware – open source, from top to bottom.

That’s where oneAPI and SYCL come in, bringing a mature programming model alongside an open-source and standards-based ecosystem of software libraries for applications of all types, such as oneMKL or oneDNN. Both SYCL and oneAPI are heterogeneous – meaning you can write code once and deploy it across GPUs without vendor restriction, whether it’s AMD, Intel, NVIDIA or now, RISC-V.

In our latest 4.0 release of the oneAPI Construction Kit, our team introduced RISC-V native host for the first time, for both native on-host and cross-compilation. This feature makes it possible to run code on a CPU and take advantage of the acceleration SYCL provides through data parallelism. This is a significant step to achieving our vision of a fully open hardware and software stack, by allowing RISC-V processor designers to now easily integrate SYCL and the oneAPI ecosystem with their hardware through the oneAPI Construction Kit. It is entirely open-source and free to use – you can get started by visiting the project on GitHub.

We implemented this support as part of our ongoing work as part of the EU-funded SYCLOPS Project. This project, which includes organizations from across Europe including CERN, Codasip, the University of Heidelberg and more, aims to bring together the RISC-V and SYCL standards into a single, portable and performant stack for the first time.

The SYCLOPS Project is just one of the ways we’re continuing to pioneer the future of open hardware and software. You can find out more about the work we’re doing at Codeplay by following the links below,

For more information on SYCL, or to try the code yourself, visit sycl.tech

Join the UXL Foundation and find out about the oneAPI specification and libraries, get started here.

To learn more about the EU-funded SYCLOPS Project, visit syclops.org

If you’re interested in AI applications, read about our recent work with llama.cpp