Rivos Inc. brings scalable, high-performance AI accelerating solutions to the Data Center, helping to turn the benefits of both AI and Data Analytics into a reality. Rivos is working with Canonical to deliver the widely utilized Ubuntu OS on top of the Data Center-class integrated RISC-V CPU and innovative GPGPU solution from Rivos.
This blog looks at the benefit of Rivos and Canonical partnering and how this partnership will impact future AI and Data Analytics use cases.
Artificial intelligence is transforming business operations across all industries by automating tasks, improving customer experiences, revealing valuable insights, and fostering innovation. As AI workloads become more complex, the demand for greater computing capabilities rises. Organizations need high-performance computing, robust storage, and advanced networking solutions that are secure, reliable, and efficient to fully utilize AI’s potential and maintain a competitive edge.
Rivos: setting the performance standard for RISC-V in Data Centers
Rivos and Canonical have partnered to enhance RISC-V-readiness in Ubuntu for Data Centers, creating a streamlined and optimized Linux experience, specifically designed for Rivos platforms. This collaboration marks a significant step in making Ubuntu more versatile and seamlessly integrated into the rapidly evolving RISC-V landscape. Additionally, it ensures that Rivos customers benefit from seamless Ubuntu integration, complete with tailored and optimized software packages.
RISC-V, an open-standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), is transforming the tech industry by offering flexibility and community-driven development, with the potential to revolutionize silicon design and ecosystem collaboration. RISC-V International fosters innovation across diverse applications by providing foundational specifications and profiles for creating custom, domain-specific processors. Widespread adoption of this emerging technology hinges on robust software and platform readiness.
This is where the partnership between Rivos and Canonical comes into play.
Optimized Ubuntu for Rivos Platforms
Since its founding in 2021, Rivos has been an active member of the RISC-V community. Rivos has become influential in both the direction and implementation of hardware and software specifications and ecosystems. Rivos has helped drive the recently rolled out RVA23 profile, which was designed to ensure software portability across hardware implementations and simplify development whilst accelerating broader adoption across the ecosystem. The alignment between the hardware and software specifications is especially valuable for compute-intensive workloads that are becoming increasingly common in applications like AI, machine learning, and enterprise-level tasks.
Canonical and Rivos, both members of RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE), recognize the significance of a robust software ecosystem and the benefits of collaborative community efforts in addressing software requirements. This approach will accelerate adoption and broaden supported software, advancing the shared goals of both companies and the ecosystem.
The collaboration between Rivos and Canonical focuses on tuning Ubuntu and open source packages to meet the specific needs of Rivos’ RISC-V cores and platforms. Here’s what the enterprise partners and end-users can expect from this optimized Ubuntu experience:
State-of-the-Art Performance
Canonical will release an Ubuntu version that targets the RVA23 profile, enabling many key architectural improvements, including vector, unaligned access, and bit manipulation extensions. In addition, Canonical will enable vendor-specific optimizations, and the collaboration with Rivos demonstrates Ubuntu’s ability to support greater ISA differentiation. This differentiation allows the use of optimized toolchains to compile packages and the recompilation or modification of packages to support Rivos-specific hardware. This provides customers a system that combines the Rivos software team’s optimizations with the Canonical team’s robust, long-term support and security maintenance.
While Rivos and Canonical are pioneering this support for differentiation, over time this will be expanded to other RISC-V platforms, benefitting the overall RISC-V ecosystem.
The Ubuntu Experience
Customers and partners will use Ubuntu on Rivos’s RISC-V platforms as on other incumbent ISA platforms with the correct optimizations available by default in Rivos Optimized Ubuntu Images.
Security and Reliability
The partnership between Rivos and Canonical represents a major leap forward for RISC-V in terms of production-readiness. With the growing momentum behind RISC-V in sectors like Data Center, networking, high-performance computing, and AI/ML, having an operating system that is optimized for both performance and reliability is critical for its wider Enterprise adoption.
Ubuntu is the Go-To Operating System for RISC-V
Ubuntu’s role in the tech industry has long been synonymous with open source innovation. It is widely used by developers, enterprises, and industries for its stability, security, and powerful ecosystem of tools. By improving Ubuntu’s performance on RISC-V platforms, Canonical is taking the next step in ensuring that Ubuntu becomes the de facto operating system for RISC-V development and deployment.
The Future
As the world of technology moves toward more open standards and custom silicon designs, partnerships like these are critical to ensuring that both the software and hardware ecosystems evolve together. Rivos and Canonical’s commitment to openness and innovation will not only benefit our enterprise partners but will also play a significant role in the future of RISC-V and its widespread adoption across industries.
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