Nvidia said in 2024 that its GPU products used more than 1 billion RISC-V cores that year. These RISC-V cores are not used for graphics rendering, but act as microcontrollers, performing various auxiliary tasks, and each GPU contains 10-40 RISC-V cores, depending on the model. Prior to RISC-V, Nvidia used the proprietary microcontroller FAst Logic Controller (Falcon). Falcon was first introduced with the G98 in 2005. By 2016, a single GPU chip integrated more than 15 different Falcon engines, and the total number of Falcon cores used in a decade was about 3 billion. These cores were used for different tasks such as video codecs, power management, and security engines. Falcon is a 32-bit core, no data cache, no longer meets the needs of NVIDIA, it began to find alternatives, after evaluating Arm, MIPS and other architectures, it finally chose the open source instruction set architecture RISC-V.
Hangtong
Hangtong Technology