NVIDIA Shipping Around One Billion RISC-V Cores In Their 2024 Products

Going back to 2016 we've known of NVIDIA beginning to use RISC-V to replace their Falcon micro-controller and other micro-controllers within their graphics processors to using this common open-source ISA. That use has continued to grow and an unofficial estimate now puts it at around one billion RISC-V cores shipping in 2024 NVIDIA chips.

Frans Sijstermans of NVIDIA was a keynote presenter at the RISC-V Summit this week in Santa Clara, California. His keynote was titled "RISC-V at NVIDIA: One Architecture, Dozens of Applications, Billions of Processors." The recording and slides have yet to be posted but Nick Brown, a Senior Research Fellow with the University of Edinburgh had shared on Twitter/X some pictures from the presentation.

The "billions" in the title appear to be accurate. Frans estimates that there are around one billion RISC-V cores shipping within the 2024 NVIDIA chips alone to grasp the scale at which they are relying on RISC-V for various MCUs and controllers within their chips. With now having phased out their former Falcon micro-controller in favor of all RISC-V, there are between 30~40 unique RISC-V IP within each modern NVIDIA chip.

RISC-V within NVIDIA hardware is responsible for various data processing, power management and other chip/system level tasks like security, camera and display handling, and other tasks. The GPU System Processor (GSP) commonly talked about on Phoronix for its driver interactions and doing more heavy lifting from the driver these days is one prime RISC-V example within recent generations of NVIDIA GPUs.

Fascinating to see the scale of RISC-V use within NVIDIA.