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"Say Hello to MIAOW, the First Open Source Graphics Processor
By Alexander Hellemans
While open-source hardware is already available for CPUs, researchers from
the Vertical Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have
announced at the Hot Chips Event in Cupertino, Calif., that they have created
the first open source general-purpose graphics processor (GPGPU).
Called MIAOW, which stands for Many-core Integrated Accelerator Of the
Waterdeep, the processor is a resistor-transistor logic implementation of
AMD's open source Southern Islands instruction set architecture. The
researchers published a white paper on the device.
The creation of MIAOW is the latest in a series of steps meant to keep
processor development in step with Moore's Law, explains computer scientist
Karu Sankaralingham, who leads the Wisconsin research group.
“We need innovative new hardware modules, new types of processors, new
types of hardware accelerators, and so on,” he says. Open source hardware
represents a promising new avenue. “I envision five, ten years from now
companies will be leveraging open-source hardware, just like it happened with
open-source software,” says Sankaralingham. “For example, Facebook was
built mainly using PHP. PHP is completely open source. It would be hard to
imagine that Facebook would have gotten off the ground if PHP wasn't
there.”
Sankaralingham and his colleagues decided to focus on a graphics processor
when AMD made the Instruction Set Architecture of one of its graphics
processors available. Graphics processors are increasingly replacing CPUs for
number crunching.
“What GPGPUs are good at is using GPU architecture to tackle highly
computationally intense problems,” says Sankaralingham. “Their
architectures have two important properties: They provide very high
performance and they are very power efficient.” Consequently, GPUs will be
used in, for example, driverless cars, navigation systems, the Internet of
Things, and deep learning. In all of these environments, there is a big need
for very high computation speed at low power use, the Wisconsin researcher
notes.
For now, MIAOW is strictly an academic research project. “One impact it
will have in my field,” says Sankaralingham, “is that academic
researchers, who have a very low-level hardware implementation in their
research, are going to adopt our ideas."
Another important consequence of the group’s work is that it has
“demonstrated that smart teams can go and build meaningful hardware parts
that can compete with high-end industrial products.” Sankaralingham says he
sees his group’s research as a stepping stone to the building of completely
clean-slate designs that don't rely on any existing commercial products from
industry. "
