RISC-V’s Edge & IoT Takeover: Billions of Open-Source Cores Drive 2025 Tech Revolution
Once a niche academic project, RISC-V is now shipping in billions of devices, especially at the edge. RISC-V International reports the ISA is implemented in over 13 billion cores on the market as of end-2023 riscv.org – a stunning rise driven largely by IoT and embedded use cases. In fact, some estimates suggest over 10 billion of those cores were shipped by 2023 primarily for IoT sensors, microcontrollers, storage controllers, and wireless chips ts2.tech. The momentum is accelerating: according to the CEO of RISC-V International, “the ecosystem is expanding rapidly… over two billion SoCs are now using RISC-V cores,” and they anticipate 20 billion+ RISC-V-powered SoCs by 2031 riscv.org. Notably, Nvidia’s embrace of RISC-V exemplifies this scale. Nvidia revealed that virtually all of its GPU/SoC microcontrollers have moved to RISC-V since 2015, and by 2024 it would ship around a billion RISC-V cores hidden inside its products tomshardware.com. Each advanced GPU packs dozens of RISC-V control cores, so with tens of millions of GPUs shipped, the RISC-V count multiplies quickly. “In 2024, Nvidia is expected to ship ~1 billion RISC-V cores built into its GPUs, CPUs, SoCs, and other products,” reported Tom’s Hardware tomshardware.com. Even Qualcomm – a mobile/IoT giant
