- YouTuber bitluni has unveiled a RISC-V DIY Graphics Processing Unit
- Builder has a library of crazy DIY projects on his YouTube channel
- RISC-V microcontrollers were sourced from AliExpress
YouTuber bitluni has revealed his latest project, which may put any concerns you have about GPU prices into context. The German DIYer, who has built a strong following with his range of exciting and off-the-wall projects, has assembled a GPU using a large collection of affordable RISC-V microcontrollers (MCUs).
While the results are impressive for a DIY build, the GPU is unfortunately quite modest and would likely have been abandoned long before had a PCB design company not reached out to explore a partnership on the build.
Demonstrating the project on his channel, bitluni – real name Matthias Balwierz – expressed how difficult the build was and how it almost drove him crazy.
8000+ RISC-V MCUs output at 320×200 resolution
In his latest video, bitluni recalls a previous attempt to build a GPU in late 2025, which led to the involvement of PCB designers Altium, explaining: “The clusters I made before already challenged my sanity. I thought I was done with the subject, but the budget and these tools would allow for a cluster of a different order of magnitude, and the size I had in mind.”
Pushing things to the next level is a hallmark of bitluni’s videos, and the finished build features an incredible 8,192 RISC-V CH570 microcontrollers, each running at 100 MHz, with 12KB of SRAM. These are mounted on blades that underwent several revisions when the PCB company declared them “too complicated.”
Each CH570 has an array of LEDs fitted and these correspond to each MCU and the corresponding QVGA pixel. With 8,192 MCUs, the resulting 320×200 might seem modest, but bitluni already has plans for a more powerful version with 32,000 MCUs.
Graphics or hashing?
The rise in GPU prices before the AI boom was thanks to industrial-scale cryptocurrency hashing, which graphics cards are particularly well-suited to. It is this relationship between hashing and graphics that gives bitluni’s project some hope beyond displaying images and video.
Bitluni has identified the serial port as the bottleneck to the project’s success as a working (if unwieldy) GPU and has appealed for help from its community of viewers to find a solution, but that didn’t bring the project to completion.
He changed tack and used the microcontrollers for hashing and found that it outperformed his PC’s 8-core CPU with a low power consumption of 4 watts, so maybe this approach is needed after all.
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