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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 antagoni

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.

jsheard 2y 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 2y ago
  They're also not the SMs but the control processors - they're basically replacing esp32s with riscv based thingamajigs.
brucehoult 2y 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-NVIDIA-Sijstermans.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI...
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  - brucehoult 2y ago
    No making fun intended. I thought my tone was entirely factual. You might also be interested to learn that at around the same time Western Digital announced a plan to switch all their (WD and SanDisk) disk controllers to RISC-V, at (then) a billion plus cores a year https://www.anandtech.com/show/12133/western-digital-to-develop-and-use-risc-v-for-controllers https://www.anandtech.com/show/12133/western-digital-to-deve... And in December 2019 Samsung announced that there are two SiFive RISC-V cores in each Galaxy S20 (and presumably the matching Galaxy Tab) https://www.anandtech.com/show/15228/samsung-to-use-riscv-cores https://www.anandtech.com/show/15228/samsung-to-use-riscv-co... Just a few heavyweights using -- and announcing! -- using RISC-V in the times before most people had heard of it.

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.

jsheard 2y 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 2y ago
They're also not the SMs but the control processors - they're basically replacing esp32s with riscv based thingamajigs.

brucehoult 2y 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-NVIDIA-Sijstermans.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI...

mixmastamyk 2y ago
https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- brucehoult 2y ago
  No making fun intended. I thought my tone was entirely factual. You might also be interested to learn that at around the same time Western Digital announced a plan to switch all their (WD and SanDisk) disk controllers to RISC-V, at (then) a billion plus cores a year https://www.anandtech.com/show/12133/western-digital-to-develop-and-use-risc-v-for-controllers https://www.anandtech.com/show/12133/western-digital-to-deve... And in December 2019 Samsung announced that there are two SiFive RISC-V cores in each Galaxy S20 (and presumably the matching Galaxy Tab) https://www.anandtech.com/show/15228/samsung-to-use-riscv-cores https://www.anandtech.com/show/15228/samsung-to-use-riscv-co... Just a few heavyweights using -- and announcing! -- using RISC-V in the times before most people had heard of it.