> Do RISCV-style free GPU projects exist or would they be unviable because of some specific properties of the GPU nature? Not that I know of, I don't think the

> Do RISCV-style free GPU projects exist or would they be unviable because of some specific properties of the GPU nature? Not that I know of, I don't think they are specifically unviable, but even RiscV is relatively new and in it's infancy, and CPU's in a sense are a subset of GPUs (modern GPUs have pretty comprehensive computation ISAs) and additionally, there exists a much more viable market for low-end CPUs that doesn't exist for GPUs in microcontrollers. > Why even bother implementing actual rendering in hardware when you can just implement fast general-purpose calculations and use them to accelerate software rendering? The answer is sort of a mixture of A. That's what we have and B. because custom hardware is very hard to beat. Do read up on Larrabee[1] So, GPU's have been converging on being more and more programmable, there are a few parts that are still much faster done in silicon, and very widely used, specifically rasterization (Though, software can be a win with e.g. micropolygons, See UE4's Nanite), Texture Sampling, and we're starting to see BVH traversal in the case of ray-tracing. And rasterization specifically is the one that pretty much dictates the structure of the render pipeline, with vertex/fragment shaders, etc and is broadly what makes it's hard to fit it into a "general-purpose" pipeline with specialized instructions. And just keep in mind, Cuda is basically just a compute shader, and a compute shader itself is basically just a fragment shader without rasterization stuck on the front and without render target blending stuck on the end, and that's also specifically the history of how we got to general-purpose GPU computation ala Cuda. [1]https://brightsideofnews.com/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed/ https://brightsideofnews.com/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-lar...