Research predicts the market will consume a total of 62.4 billion RISC-V CPU cores by 2025

Compared with other instruction sets, the open-source instruction-set RISC-V can be freely used for any purpose, allowing anyone to design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software. Because of these characteristics, it has successively attracted IBM, NXP, Western Digital, NVIDIA. More than 100 technology companies, including Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, Huawei, Ali, Red Hat, and Tesla, have joined the RISC-V chips ecosystem, and the industry is constantly building an ecosystem around it, which has caused a huge impact on competitors such as ARM.

Recently, market research agency Semico Research initiated a study to quantify the total available market (TAM) of CPU IP cores and estimate the service available market (SAM) of RISC-V IP cores. The research results show that by 2025, the number of chips using the RISC-V architecture is expected to increase to 62.4 billion, with a compound growth rate of 146% from 2018 to 2025. These chips will be mainly used in industrial markets, PC, consumer electronics and communications markets.

RISC-V Switzerland

RISC-V foundation [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Semico Research and the RISC-V Foundation jointly identified 34 market segments, studied TAM and SAM for each market, and finally forecasted 2025 data. The report highlights four semiconductor devices with high-value opportunities using RISC-V cores:

  • Advanced Performance Multicore SoC
  • Value Multicore SoC
  • Basic SoCs, and
  • FPGAs

Semico Research states that interest in RISC-V products is growing in all major end-use applications and that ongoing significant development is ongoing. In addition, RISC-V equipment also has a wide range of high performance. RISC-V’s flexible open-source strategy provides a competitive advantage, which will change the pattern of the CPU IP market.