Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek’s chatbot took the tech world by storm in the beginning of the year, surpassing 100 million users shortly after its launch. DeepSeek’s powerful reasoning model based on a Mixture of Experts (MoE) transformer architecture has a massive number of parameters, imposing high demands on computing power, memory capacity, and bandwidth.

ESWIN Computing successfully ran DeepSeek’s AI model on its EVB development boards after modifying its self-developed RISC-V AI SoCs – the EIC7700X and the EIC7702X of the EIC77 series.

The EIC7700X and the 7702X come with hardware accelerators including NPUs, GPUs, and DSPs, plus the LPDDR5 memory that offers large capacity and high bandwidth. They maximize the usage of hardware resource and enable rapid parameter transfer when processing DeepSeek’s large language model, significantly enhancing the reasoning performance. Test results show that the EIC7700X SoC EVB development board runs the DeepSeek-Distill-Qwen-7B model at an impressive speed of 7 tokens per second, while the EIC7702X SoC EVB development board runs at 14 tokens per second, outperforming similar architectures with much higher energy efficiency ratios.

Test results of RISC-V AI SoC compatibility with DeepSeek’s model

The EIC77 12nm RISC-V AI SoC series uses the 4-core 64-bit out-of-order RISC-V P550 CPU, the company’s self-developed power-efficient NPU, as well as DSP, GPU, and H.264/H.265 codecs. It delivers 20 TOPS at INT4 precision for AI processing and supports up to 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory, full-stack floating-point arithmetic calculations, and large language models. In particular, the EIC7702X dual-die AI SoC is configured with the 8-core 64-bit out-of-order RISC-V P550 CPU, performs up to 40 TOPS at INT8 precision, and supports 64GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory.

EIC7700X Module

EIC7700X（left）and EIC7702X（right）

The EIC7700X/EIC7702X SoC EVB development board features 32/64 GB LPDDR capacity and 4/8-lane Gen3 PCIe interfaces, and supports a rich set of interfaces such as SATA3, HDMI2.0, 1000M Ethernet, USB3.2, and MIPI. The development board offers strong capabilities for machine vision, object classification, object localization, image segmentation, action and pose recognition, natural language processing, and more, making it suitable for various fields such as security operations, industrial inspection, smart education, self-driving, robotics, drones, and smart mobility. In addition to development boards, the EIC77 series is versatile to integrate with AI boxes, AI PCs, and server accelerator cards, suited to AI processing in cloud, edge, and endpoint scenarios.

Wide range of application scenarios

The rapid adaptation of the EIC77 series to DeepSeek’s large language model demonstrates the solid technical expertise of ESWIN Computing. The RISC-V AI SoCs offer high computational efficiency, and the software development tools feature great versatility and ease of use. They support multiple deep learning algorithms and models and allow for easy integration and fast adaptation, showcasing the great practical utility of the company’s cutting-edge chips and tool chain after successive architecture iterations.

As AI technology is racing ahead, ESWIN Computing will push forward the RISC-V+AI technical strategy and offer higher-performance, more energy-efficient chips and solutions to meet the ever-growing need for computing power and help expand AI applications in myriad industries.