The next RISC-V processor frontier: AI

By Majeed Ahmad, EDN | October 31, 2025

The RISC-V Summit North America, held on 22-23 October 2025 in Santa Clara, California, showcased the latest CPU cores featuring new vector processors, high-speed interfaces, and peripheral subsystems. These CPU cores were accompanied by reference boards, software design kits (SDKs), and toolchains.

The show also provided a sneak peek of the RISC-V’s design ecosystem, which is maturing fast with the RVA23 application profile and RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE), a Linux Foundation project. The emerging ecosystem encompasses compilers, system libraries, language runtimes, simulators, emulators, system firmware, and more.

“The performance gap between high-end Arm and RISC-V CPU cores is narrowing and a near parity is projected by the end of 2026,” said Richard Wawrzyniak, principal analyst for ASIC, SoC and IP at The SHD Group. He named Andes, MIPS, Nuclei Systems, and SiFive as market leaders in RISC-V IP. Wawrzyniak also mentioned new entrants such as Akeana, Tenstorrent, and Ventana.

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