It may come as a surprise that over 10 billion RISC-V processor cores have shipped. After all, it took ARM 17 years to reach that milestone in 2008, and RISC-V could be considered to be in its infancy with a consensus that the ecosystem still needs to evolve, particularly around security.
These two factors result from the open standard approach to an inherently custom technology. The instruction set can be easily extended to accelerate key instructions, reducing die area and boosting performance. As a result many chip makers are using the technology embedded in devices with custom extensions without the need for external tools.
