NVIDIA Ships Over One Billion RISC-V Cores This Year Inside Its Accelerators, Up to 40 Cores Per Chip

[AleksandarK]

During the 2024 RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara, California, NVIDIA was one of the presenting members. RISC-V, being a free and open-source instruction set architecture, is an interesting choice for many companies looking to develop custom solutions. NVIDIA designs accelerators for AI and graphics processing, all of which are equipped with up to tens of thousands of cores. To manage these cores, NVIDIA has developed a custom RISC-V processor called "NV-RISCV," which is a replacement for its predecessor "Falcon." Unlike Falcon, NV-RISCV is based on an open-source ISA and is customized much more deeply, with features like more customized caches and special instructions. Initially, the company reported better performance over its Falcon GPU System Processor (GSP), and NV-RISCV is now running in millions of NVIDIA chips.

Thanks to a post on X by Nick Brown, we learn that NVIDIA is shipping roughly one billion RISC-V cores in the year 2024. Each NVIDIA chip includes between 10 and 40 RISC-V cores, depending on the chip size and complexity. Some more complex designs, like GB200, require massive data coordination, meaning that more cores are needed to handle these requests and distribute them. This includes chip-to-chip interfaces, context switching, memory controller, camera handling, video codecs, display output, resource management, power management, and more. NVIDIA has developed a total of over 20 custom extensions for RISC-V cores, which all serve their specific use cases.



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[HalfAHertz]

1B / 40 chips = 25+ million GPUs with RISC-V sold? Nv sells like hot cakes but those numbers are very doubtful. My guess would be they sold between 2 and 3 mil GPUs, which is an order of magnitude less.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

1B / 40 chips = 25+ million GPUs with RISC-V sold? Nv sells like hot cakes but those numbers are very doubtful. My guess would be they sold between 2 and 3 mil GPUs, which is an order of magnitude less.

40 cores is maximum for now and I suppose that Nvidia sells not only GPU's which includes risk-v.

 

[igormp]

1B / 40 chips = 25+ million GPUs with RISC-V sold? Nv sells like hot cakes but those numbers are very doubtful. My guess would be they sold between 2 and 3 mil GPUs, which is an order of magnitude less.

Those RISC-V chips have been present in their GPUs since Turing iirc, so quite some time to sell all those GPUs.
Also remember that it's not only the consumer market, but also the server one.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

40 cores is maximum for now and I suppose that Nvidia sells not only GPU's which includes risk-v.

It's used in a lot of different things they make.

Those RISC-V chips have been present in their GPUs since Turing iirc, so quite some time to sell all those GPUs.
Also remember that it's not only the consumer market, but also the server one.

Very much this! Nvidia is not just GPUs and the server/enterprise market is vastly more profitable and very different than the gaming market.

 

[ScaLibBDP]

1B / 40 chips = 25+ million GPUs with RISC-V sold? Nv sells like hot cakes but those numbers are very doubtful. My guess would be they sold between 2 and 3 mil GPUs, which is an order of magnitude less.

Take into account that NVIDIA sells consumer GPUs ( external for gaming and discrete inside notebooks ) and data center GPUs. I think a total number of sold GPUs should be way over 10 millions.

Verify it in any search engine and just enter: "How many GPUs NVIDIA sold in 2024?"

There are a lot of links regarding that topic. The fact is that NVIDIA moves away from ARM!