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.
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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