Every Nvidia GPU has 10 to 30 RISC-V cores inside it
Nvidia ships an estimated 1-2 billion RISC-V cores yearly inside GPUs as management processors, replacing its proprietary 32-bit Falcon microcontrollers in 2018.
XDA details how modern Nvidia GPUs contain 10-40 RISC-V cores handling management tasks like video encode/decode, power management, and the security engine, with Nvidia estimating over a billion cores shipped in 2024. These cores succeeded Falcon (FAst Logic CONtroller), a proprietary 32-bit design dating to ~2005 that lacked 64-bit addressing and a data cache; a 2016 evaluation rejected Arm Cortex-A53/A9/R5, Synopsys ARC HS, and Berkeley's Rocket. The new RISC-V core delivers three times Falcon's performance at twice the area. Security-relevant details include on-die boot ROM validating signed firmware, cryptographically verified cores that resist tampering, and 2014 changes that locked nouveau out of unsigned firmware on Maxwell-era GPUs and later.