As we know that Apple has already started its complete transition of its Pcs to Arm-based SoCs and away from Intel’s chips. However, it also announced that the company will not be removing all the devices into the custom chips.
According to recent reports, the Cupertino giant is also exploring the emerging open-source RISC-V architecture. Apple is also hiring programmers for the development of RISC-V as this week the Cupertino giant posted a job alert for RISC-V high-performance programmer(s).
Currently, the Cupertino, California-based tech giant is hunting for experienced programmers with detailed knowledge of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and Arm’s Neon vector ISA for its Vector and Numerics Group (VaNG) within its Core Operating Systems group. The company’s VaNG is responsible for developing and improving various embedded subsystems that run on iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
However, Apple is yet to disclose as to what exactly it plans to do with RISC-V, however according to the job description the programmers who are hired for the position will have to work with machine learning, computational vision, and natural language processing.
“You will work in an SW and HW cross-functional team which is implementing innovative RISC-V solutions and state-of-the-art routines,” the description reads [emphasis added]. “This is to support the necessary computation for such things as machine learning, vision algorithms, signal, and video processing. Push the state of the art in low-level computation and drive them towards energy-efficient and high-performance implementations by tightly integrating software and hardware.”
Currently, Apple is busy with products across multiple product lines such as high-performance devices like MacBook laptops, iPhone smartphones, iPad tablets, and Apple TV set-top-boxes that will be based on custom system-on-chips (SoCs) that use highly-customized Arm cores.
The latest hiring of programmers for RISC-V solutions shows us that the Cupertino giant has already started its work on the RISC-V solutions, and it is only a matter of time now before the company replaces certain types of cores with RISC-V.
