Esperanto Technologies
The RISC-V shop's bid to run AI inference on over a thousand tiny cores instead of one big GPU.
Esperanto Technologies was founded in 2014 by Dave Ditzel, formerly chief architect of SPARC at Sun and the founder of Transmeta. Its ET-SoC-1 chip packs more than a thousand simple RISC-V cores (ET-Minion) onto one die for machine-learning inference, with low power draw as the main pitch against Nvidia's GPUs.
The effort is one of the more visible proofs that RISC-V can carry more than embedded systems, and the company has since pivoted toward licensing its cores rather than only selling finished chips.