Neat. I’ve been watching a lot of Nvidia board level repair videos; the technician would occasionally probe the SPI signal lines to the flash chip containing “VBIOS” code to see if the GPU shows signs of life. Given no external microcontrollers on the board, I’ve always wondered what is the type of core that runs mundane tasks like executing the boot ROM, controlling PWM output for the fans, setting RGB LED colors etc. My guess was on Cortex-M, but I guess I might be wrong.

I think Nvidia made a good choice to concentrate logic into the main die, despite a CPU usually having a separate EC (Embedded Controller) or Super IO chip to deal with bootstrapping and fluff. It likely helped board vendors avoid having to go through 50 STM32 copycat product lines during COVID, even though this means the GPU die’s signals are somewhat exposed in practice and “power users” keep blowing up their cards when trying to do a cooling mod.

That's really the best use for RISCV, small embedded microcontrollers handling mundane tasks. I think it's cool people are trying to turn it into a desktop and server platform but it really stands out as being a much cheaper Cortex-M or Cortex-R replacement.

This news is like a year old. I think they revealed it at the 2025 RISC-V summit in America.