Nvidia to ship a billion of RISC-V cores in 2024

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-to-ship-a-billion-of-risc-v-cores-in-2024

by ohong • 2 years ago

30 11 2 years ago

ohong• 2 years ago

Announced during Nvidia's presentation at this year's RISC-V Summit.

Great news that I've never heard before. Good to know R5 has at least one friend with deep pockets. Wouldn't have guessed NVDA, who has been somewhat antagonistic to open computing.

jsheard2• 2 years ago

These RISC-V cores are an internal implementation detail of their GPUs, so although the architecture is open they aren't really open in the sense that you can actually program them. Nvidia is doing it to save a buck because they no longer have to roll their own architecture (as they did previously) or pay for ARM licenses.

almostgotcaught• 2 years ago

They're also not the SMs but the control processors - they're basically replacing esp32s with riscv based thingamajigs.

brucehoult2• 2 years ago

Nvidia talked publicly about this in May 2017, 7 1/2 years ago. No doubt they had already spent some time on it before that.

https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI...

mixmastamyk2• 2 years ago

https://xkcd.com/1053/

camel-cdr2• 2 years ago

What really surprised me to learn is that use some VLEN=1024 RVV 1.0 cores: https://x.com/FlorianWoh/status/1848771326791848438/photo/3

jsheard2• 2 years ago

That neatly lines up with their actual GPU cores which are also 1024 bits wide (32 lanes of FP32) but I have no idea why they would need to go that wide in an auxiliary management core.

camel-cdr2• 2 years ago

I noticed that as well, but it's still not obvious to me why, they must do a decent amount of complex computation on them. Otherwise, they could've also used VLEN=128 with LMUL=8 to get effectively four 1024-bit vector registers.

knowitnone• 2 years ago

Meh. They've spent a bunch of money engineering these but could have bought a microcontroller from the numerous companies for pennies. Yes, they have more than enough money to waste which is exactly what they have done here. If they have further plans for RISC-V, ie compete with ARM, AMD, Intel, Amazon, then that is something to cheer.

Nvidia to ship a billion of RISC-V cores in 2024

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