When the Agent Designs the Chip

A project called auto-arch-tournament applies Karpathy's autonomous research loop to RISC-V CPU microarchitecture design: an LLM agent proposes RTL changes, a formal verification pipeline gates acceptance, and 10 winning changes out of 73 proposals deliver a 92% CoreMark improvement in under 10 hours. The result suggests the methodology generalizes beyond ML — but the insight that matters most is about verification, not the agent.

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