Think Silicon, recognized for the successful ultra-low power NEMA® GPU-Series for MCU driven SoCs, announced the demonstration of the industry’s first RISC-V ISA based 3D GPU -- the NEOX|V™. Attendees at the RISC-V Summit, in San Jose, California, will have the first opportunity to witness this new GPU innovation designed for the rapid deployment of Computer Graphics, Machine Learning and open GPGPU compute framework applications.

Offering a myriad of flexible possibilities, NEOX|V ™ IP is designed to be easily configured for applications such as computer graphics, machine learning, vision/video processing and general-purpose compute. The new offering provides a platform for implementation in multiple embedded and external devices across many consumer and industrial vertical markets including Graphics, Compute, and AI for IoT/Edge/Compute.

While there has been the Libre RISC-V community-driven effort to create a RISC-V graphics processor that basically amounts to a RISC-V core with vector extensions/improvements and running a Vulkan software implementation (though they are now reportedly eyeing POWER instead of RISC-V), Think Silicon has announced the first actual RISC-V ISA based 3D graphics processor.

At ELC Europe in Lyon I held a nice little presentation about the state of upstream graphics drivers, and how absolutely awesome it all is. Of course with a big focus on SoC and embedded drivers. Slides and the video recording

While originally Intel planned to transition their OpenGL driver default to the modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver rather than the longstanding "i965" DRI driver for Mesa 19.3, that was pushed back to Mesa 20.0 for introduction in Q1'2020. In aiming to make that revised milestone a reality, a new option has been added to Mesa 20.0 with the Meson build system for being able to indicate the Intel OpenGL driver preference.

The plan is for Mesa 20.0 to default to their new Gallium3D driver with Broadwell "Gen8" graphics and newer, including Icelake "Gen11". It's with Tiger Lake "Gen12" graphics where there is only support being implemented anyhow on this Gallium3D driver and not the older i965 OpenGL driver. As it stands right now when building Mesa, the i965 driver is used by default and then an environment variable allows overriding the driver to load in order to use Iris Gallium3D.