Nvidia cannot sell her most powerful chips to China for sanctions. So you have found a plan B: Risc-V

Nvidia has announced that Its CUDA platform will be compatible with RISC-V processors. He has done so during the Risc-V Summit in China and the chosen place is not accidental: this announcement clearly points to the Chinese market.

For the first time, the technology that allows applications to communicate with the NVIDIA GPUs will be extended beyond ARM and X86, towards an open source architecture.

Why is it important. CUDA It is the software that operates the Nvidia’s ecosystem. Without a CUDA, the GPU would lose much of their parallel calculation apacities.

That Nvidia opens this technology to RISC-V It means that processors based on this open architecture can now serve as the main CPU in NVIDIA GPU systems.

The background. The announcement, in addition to making in China, comes while China is accelerating its efforts to reduce its dependence of western processors.

Nvidia can’t sell your most powerful models GB200 and GB300 to China for US sanctions, so in this way finds a way to maintain relevant Cuda in the Chinese market.

Between the lines. There is a lot of geopolitical strategy in this decision: NVIDIA has been integrating RISC-V nuclei for years into its own GPU for low-level control tasks. Now it makes the jump to support RISC-V as the main processor.

And that responds to a reality: if China is going to develop its own processors using open architectures, Nvidia wants to be there from the beginning.

In detail. The configuration shown by NVIDIA shows a heterogeneous system:

1. The GPU handles parallel loads.
2. The RISC-V processor executes the CUDA controllers and the application logic.
3. And a DPU manages network tasks.

This architecture allows you to orchestrate GPU computations completely within the CUDA environment, something impossible so far with RISC-V.

Deepen. Historically, Nvidia has behaved Cuda to each important architecture: X86, ARM, PowerPC and even Sparc de Sun. The company understands that it must be present from the first day on any platform that can take off in the business sector. With a value already exceeding 4 billion dollarsNvidia can afford to bet on all promising architectures.

And now the movement positions RISC-V as a viable alternative for future designs of AI processors and high performance computing. If the stars align, other manufacturers could follow the example of Nvidia. And that would accelerate the adoption of RISC-V in data centers beyond China.

Outstanding image | Wikimedia Commons

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