Hot Chips 2026: CUDA Targets RISC-V

CUDA is a giant for GPU compute, which includes machine learning applications. So far, CUDA supports x86-64 and aarch64 CPUs. Now, Nvidia is looking at extending CUDA support to RISC-V. This move opens the door for RISC-V CPUs to feed GPU compute. Nvidia’s talk focuses on the requirements that RISC-V CPUs must fulfill to work with CUDA. Basically, they want a server-grade CPU and platform.Nvidia starts by requiring a RVA23 CPU, and adherence to RISC-V’s server SoC and server platform specifications. Those specifications include RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features, a specialized security processor, and other baseline features. Nvidia gets most of their server-grade expectations fulfilled by those specifications. Nvidia has a few more requirements that go beyond the RISC-V profile or platform specifications listed above, because they found it difficult to make CUDA software work well without those features. They don’t want a lowest common denominator problem,…