https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/ubitium-announces-development-of-universal-processor-that-combines-cpu-gpu-dsp-and-fpga-functionalities-risc-v-powered-chip-slated-to-arrive-in-two-years Skip to main content (*) ( ) Open menu Close menu Tom's Hardware [ ] Search Search Tom's Hardware [ ] RSS US Edition flag of US flag of UK UK flag of US US flag of Australia Australia flag of Canada Canada * * Best Picks * Raspberry Pi * CPUs * GPUs * 3D Printers * News * Coupons * More + Newsletter + Reviews + PC Components + Motherboards + SSDs + PC Building + Monitors + Laptops + Gaming + Cooling + RAM + Power Supplies + Cases + 3D Printers + Desktops + Overclocking + Peripherals + About Us Forums Trending * Black Friday SSD Deals Live * AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D * Black Friday Monitor Deals Live * Core Ultra 9 285K * Best Black Friday Tech Deals 1. PC Components 2. CPUs Ubitium announces development of 'universal' processor that combines CPU, GPU, DSP, and FPGA functionalities - RISC-V powered chip slated to arrive in two years News By Matthew Connatser published 24 November 2024 2026 launch date may be more aspirational than set-in-stone. * * * * * * * Comments (2) When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here's how it works. Ubitium's Universal Processor. (Image credit: Ubitium) The semiconductor industry produces many kinds of distinct processors, but RISC-V startup Ubitium says it's working on a single architecture that can rule them all. Emerging from stealth sometime this year, Ubitium has gone public to announce the development of its Universal Processor, which is based on a "workload-agnostic microarchitecture." "Our Universal Processor does it all - CPU, GPU, DSP, FPGA - in one chip, one architecture. This isn't an incremental improvement. It is a paradigm shift. This is the processor architecture the AI era demands," Ubitium CEO Hyun Shin Cho says. The Universal Processor is based on the RISC-V architecture, traditionally used for CPUs. However, Ubitium's upcoming chip isn't something like AMD's MI300A or Nvidia's Grace-Hopper Superchip, which combine distinct CPU and GPU chips into one package. Instead, Ubititum claims all of the transistors in its Universal Processor can be reused for everything; no "specialized cores" like those in CPUs and GPUs are required. In concept, Ubitium's RISC-V processor sounds like an FPGA, which can be reprogrammed to change its functionality, sometimes also known as hardware emulation. But while FPGAs tend to come short of chips designed for specific uses in areas like performance, efficiency, and value, Ubititum says the Universal Processor will be "smaller, more energy-efficient, and significantly less costly." The developers behind Ubitium's Universal Processor are a handful of semiconductor veterans who worked at companies like Intel, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments, as well as smaller chip firms such as PACT XPP Technologies. Incidentally, PACT, which focuses on FPGAs and parallel computing, has been involved in a few patent lawsuits against Intel ( twice in fact) and Xilinx (now part of AMD). Although the Ubitium team has a decent amount of talent and experience, they don't have a ton of funding yet. So far the company has raised $3.7 million, which Ubititum says will be used to develop prototypes and create development kits, ahead of the Universal Processor's launch date sometime in 2026. Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. [ ][ ]Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands[ ]Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors[Sign me up] By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. While $3.7 million isn't nothing, it's almost certainly not enough to get Ubitium's "breakthrough" chip off the ground. It usually costs a few hundred million dollars to get a chip to the tape-out phase, when the first samples are fabbed. With $3.7 million, Ubitium can use hardware description languages like Verilog to design its architecture, and potentially emulate it using an FPGA to test it further. But at some point, Ubitium will undoubtedly require greater financial backing to launch its Universal Processor. Even if Ubitium had much more funding, being able to launch in 2026 is still a very tall order. Traditional microarchitectures made by industry titans such as AMD, Intel, or Apple can take years to develop; launching an architecture that's supposed to "revolutionize" the industry in just two years would be challenging, to say the least. Ubitium isn't just working on a single chip, either, and envisions having a "complete portfolio of chips that vary in array size but share the same microarchitecture and software stack." These chips would cover everything from "small embedded devices" (similar to AMD's Ryzen embedded CPUs) to "high-performance computing systems," which would compete with the fastest and biggest processors in the industry. This isn't the first chip startup in 2024 to make claims about transforming the semiconductor industry with just a few million dollars in the bank. Earlier this year, Flow Computing announced it was working on a Parallel Processing Unit, or PPU, that could increase CPU performance by a hundredfold after rewriting software. Flow's PPU however sounds a lot like a GPU, much like how Ubitium's Universal Processor sounds like an FPGA. See more CPUs News TOPICS RISC-V See all comments (2) Matthew Connatser Matthew Connatser Social Links Navigation Matthew Connatser is a freelancing writer for Tom's Hardware US. He writes articles about CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and computers in general. More about cpus Intel Core i9-13900K drops under $400 to all-time-low Intel Core i9-13900K drops to all-time-low under $400 in Black Friday deal Ryzen Threadripper 7000-series CPU Threadripper 9000 CPUs spotted with 16 to 96 Zen 5 cores -- Shimada Peak expected to max out at 350W Latest Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 Applied Materials MAX OLED screens touted to offer 5x lifespan -- tech claimed to produce brighter and higher resolution screens too See more latest > [ ] 2 Comments Comment from the forums * bit_user The article said: RISC-V startup Ubitium says it's working on a single architecture that can rule them all. It seems like we hear about one of these, every couple of years. The most recent, best known example was probably Tachyum, which so far appears to be vaporware. ...that's not to say that Tachyum is fraudulent, just that they were way overly optimistic about how quickly they could get systems to market, by which point established players had already passed them by and they had to go back and design something even newer and better, to have a chance at competing. Pretty much exactly what I said would happen. The article said: Ubititum claims all of the transistors in its Universal Processor can be reused for everything; no "specialized cores" like those in CPUs and GPUs are required. I'll be interesting to hear how this meaningfully differs from what CPUs do. CPU cores have a vector/floating-point pipeline that fuses most of their heavy-duty floating-point and integer vector operations. The scalar integer stuff doesn't take up much space and is therefore fine to keep separate. Actually, with RDNA3, AMD took the approach of using its vector compute hardware to implement WMMA (thanks to those who set me straight, on this point), meaning they don't even have dedicated tensor cores. Also, I think their RT performance lags Nvidia, in large part because they've tried to minimize the dedicated hardware for RT and relied mostly on tricks like tweaking their texture engines to do BVH traversal. Where FPGAs can come out ahead is by using more functional parallelism than what CPUs or GPUs can do. Normal, programmable processors are limited mostly to data parallelism. However, FPGAs have overheads the others don't, which is why they tend to be replaced by hardwired logic, for anything sufficiently well-defined, and "soft cores" on FPGAs never perform as well as the hard-wired cores in CPUs. The article said: So far the company has raised $3.7 million That's known as "seed funding". We rarely hear about startups, during this phase. I guess they're having trouble raising their series-A funding, which is why they've gone out of stealth mode so soon. Well, I look forward to seeing if they're truly doing something new, so I hope they at least make it that far. Reply * epobirs This sounds like stuff I've seen repeatedly over the last 40 years. On the occasions when there is an actual product that can be evaluated by engineers outside the producer, the tech is found to be good at versatility and little else. It can do a lot of things but none of them especially well. Jack of all trades but master of none. There may be a niche market for that but I wouldn't want be the one assigned to convince investors of that. Transmeta, Mpact!, and the IBM, Toshiba, and Sony CELL project was another. The original PS3 concept would have several CELL processors in the box and no dedicated GPU or other major functions. The CELLs would do everything, with the developer allocating bandwidth as needed for the app. This is why the first E3 demos were separate CELL and Nvidia demos. There wasn't enough time to produce anything on the actual prototype PS3 after Sony found that 1. the CELL was way too expensive to use multiples in a game console, and 2. the multiprocessing functionality failed above two processors. The concept wouldn't work and would be prohibitively expensive if it did. (Never mind the really absurd claims Sony made early on about having many CELL driven devices in you home, all networked, that could be enlisted to add their capacity to running games.) 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