Plucky startup Bolt Graphics still wants to use RISC-V to compete with Nvidia, AMD in AI and beyond — and given CUDA's port on RISC-V, there may be something there

• Bolt Graphics is building a RISC-V based GPU to challenge Nvidia
• CUDA support on RISC-V could lower software barriers for alternative accelerators
• Zeus targets path tracing, HPC, and large memory workloads over traditional shaders

Bolt Graphics is pressing ahead with its plan to challenge Nvidia and AMD by building a graphics processor around a RISC-V controlled architecture rather than a conventional GPU design.

The Sunnyvale, California based startup’s Zeus architecture is a ground up rethink of graphics, rendering, and high performance compute workloads.

Instead of relying on traditional shader heavy designs, Zeus combines fixed function hardware for rasterization, ray tracing, and path tracing with an in house SIMD engine.