Although Nvidia’s GPUs rely on proprietary CUDA cores that feature their instruction set architecture and support for various data formats, these cores are controlled by custom cores that rely on the industry-standard RISC-V ISA, albeit with some extensions, the company revealed at the RISC-V Summit this month (via NickBrownHPC).
Modern GPUs are highly complex system-on-chips with a massive number of functions and resources — starting from compute resources and power management and all the way to display engines and security — that must be managed.