VideoCardz - NVIDIA enables GPU System Processor (GSP) on select Tesla/Data Center accelerators
“Starting with 510.39 drivers, NVIDIA is enabling GSP to select Tesla/Data Center GPUs, primarily based on Ampere and Turing architectures. The GSP will offload tasks that were traditionally performed by CPUs, such as GPU initialization and management tasks.
Users can still force-disable GSP, but this means that some display related features or power management related features will not work properly. However, those features are yet to be added to GSP tasks.
‘Some GPUs include a GPU System Processor (GSP) which can be used to offload GPU initialization and management tasks. This processor is driven by the firmware file /lib/firmware/nvidia/510.39.01/gsp.bin. A few select products currently use GSP by default, and more products will take advantage of GSP in future driver releases.
Offloading tasks which were traditionally performed by the driver on the CPU can improve performance due to lower latency access to GPU hardware internals.’ — NVIDIA
There is no indication that GSP might be enabled for consumers products, however, any tasks that can be offloaded from the CPU is probably a good way to go.
One would guess that GSP is based on the RISC-V Falcon microcontroller which was introduced by NVIDIA back in 2016. Assuming that this controller is being used by current-gen NVIDIA GPUS.”
My thoughts: This might make it into the consumer market eventually. I believe that the consumer market would welcome this, but it is not a priority for NVIDIA at this time.
The listing of the NVIDIA products using GPU the system processor is in the article.