NVIDIA ISAdding Native RISC-V Support To CUDA

When Selling Hardware To China Becomes A Challenge, Port Your Product To Their Hardware

The main restrictions in the US on selling high end hardware to China have just been lifted, allowing both NVIDIA and AMD to start selling their HPC products to that market again.  In theory the same would apply to Intel if they managed to make an attractive product of that type.  There is a lot of uncertainty in the market, and it is not unwise for a company to find ways to guarantee they won’t lose access to that market again and NVIDIA has done just that.  They’ve updated CUDA to fully compatible with ISA RISC-V CPUs, to ensure whatever GPUs they can sell to China will be able to run at full efficiency.

This is a huge step for NVIDIA’s market share, which is already mind boggling, as the Chinese chip developer Alibaba has released another new RISC-V based processor called the C930 which they claim is almost as powerful as ARM’s Neoverse products.  The details of the hardware involved are sketchy for now, as there will certainly be some challenges strapping a RISC-V processor to a CUDA powerhouse like NVIDIA’s H20.  As far as NVIDIA is concerned that’s just a small engineering problem, they’ve already scored their victory by making CUDA products far more attractive than the competition, even in China.

If you’ve lost count, this adds the list of architectures which fully support CUDA to RISC-V, x86, ARM and Power9.