For decades, chip architectures have been dominated by a pair of towering incumbents—x86 and Arm—defining and powering everything from laptops to hyperscale data centers. But in recent years, the open-standard RISC-V instruction set architecture has evolved from an academic project into a legitimate disruptor, increasingly embedded across a diverse range of compute platforms.
Today, amid a wave of industry consolidation, geopolitical shifts, and an AI-driven workload explosion, RISC-V is accelerating toward mainstream relevance with some of the largest chip players backing it.
RISC-V: From Academic Roots To A Billion Cores Milestone
RISC-V was born in 2010 at UC Berkeley, designed as a clean-slate, royalty-free ISA optimized for modern workloads and extensibility. Its founding team—still active in steering the standard through RISC-V International (RVI)—envisioned an open hardware ecosystem that encouraged innovation across both academia and industry.