RISC-V set to announce 25% market penetration — open-standard ISA is ahead of schedule, securing fast-growing silicon footprint

ARM has some competition in the reduced-complexity chip space, and it's gaining ground quickly. RISC-V International plans to announce that silicon on the open-standard has reached 25% market penetration later this month, according to an announcement posted to LinkedIn. Market analysts SHD Group are primed to announce their findings on RISC-V market share at the RISC-V Summit North America.

RISC-V is an open-standard (not to be confused with open-source) instruction set architecture (ISA) for CPUs, first established in 2014. For those unfamiliar, an instruction set architecture is a technical model that determines how computer software controls the computer’s processor. The ISA defines what instructions a processor can perform in order to output computations. RISC-V, a reduced-complexity ISA, is most closely related to ARM, also a RISC, known for powering most mobile and some laptop devices.

That RISC-V has swelled to 25% market penetration could come as a shock to industry analysts. While it's uncertain at this point whether the market in question refers to all silicon microprocessors or just the markets that RISC-V has entered so far, those being mostly simple MCUs for IoT and automotive use-cases, the number still represents a mighty leap for the ISA.

Just last year, Omdia predicted that RISC-V would hit 25% share of the entire semiconductor market in 2030, reaching 17 billion chips shipped in 2030. Now the SHD Group's forthcoming estimates raise this number to 21+ billion chips by 2031, eclipsing $2 billion in total revenue by this point. RISC-V International credits this increase in growth to RISC-V's use in Edge AI deployments, referring to more localized data hubs serving smaller communities, rather than sending all work to a general cloud hub.

RISC-V’s most essential distinguishing factor is that it is an open standard. Working groups and tech firms can access, use, and iterate on the RISC-V standard for free, without paying licenses or entering into contracts with the RISC-V governing body. Arm, on the contrary, makes money off licensing the ARM instruction set and pre-designed CPU cores to client firms and chipmakers, offering closer support to client companies while also receiving royalties from the use of its designs. This increased collaboration and community contribution have been a major hallmark of RISC-V's continued growth.

The full picture of the 25% market estimate will be unveiled in a keynote address at the RISC-V Summit North America, beginning in Santa Clara, CA, on October 21st. Other speakers at the Summit will include Google, AWS, and NASA, all perennial attendees of the summits. RISC-V has also received much attention from Meta lately; the Facebook company acquired the RISC-V GPU firm Rivos last week in pursuit of its own RISC-V-based AI accelerator.

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