NVIDIA’s been a long-time friend with x86 for a couple of decades, while the partnership with Arm in the AI era has helped it create some of the most powerful computing hardware to date. But now, Team Green is gunning for RISC-V, as it announced CUDA support for the CPU architecture over at the 2025 RISC-V Summit in China.
Officially revealed by Frans Sijsterman, the VP of Hardware Engineering, this initial investment might not be tangible in the short term, but knowing NVIDIA is always about dabbling in any tech field that they could sow some seed and possibly realize enormous levels of return down the line just like how did with AI, the move becomes much more understandable now.
In terms of how CUDA could help RISC-V, it comes to allowing the CPUs to manage system-level tasks in CUDA environments, such as running drivers, application logic, and even the OS itself, and the focus now appears to be on edge and embedded systems such as NVIDIA Jetson products.
Another slide also pointed out some interesting combos, such as RISC-V CPU + NVIDIA GPU/DPU/Others – Yes, this might sound like the MGX line of products. But there could be more changes and differences in the end product compared to the actual MGX hardware.
The move of revealing this in China could feel like Team Green is trying other strategies in order to help Chinese companies access CUDA one way or another, as at the current state, NVIDIA hardware can be easily blocked/banned from export at a moment’s notice by an executive order.
Nevertheless, this is a piece of good news for embedded platform devs as there are more ways to work around the open CPU ecosystem.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
