Comment by ryao

RISC-V is definitely gaining traction in China, but it does not have a monopoly on Chinese CPU core design:

  * Loongson is pushing a MIPS derivative forward.
  * Sugon is pushing a x86 derivative (originally derived from AMD Zen) forward
  * Zhaoxin is pushing a x86 derivative (derived from VIA’s chips) forward.

There was Shenwei with its Alpha processor derivative, but that effort has not had any announcements in years. However, there is still ARM China. Tianjin Phytium and HiSilicon continue to design ARM cores presumably under license from ARM China. There are probably others I missed.

There is also substantial RISC-V development outside of China. Some notable ones are:

  * SiFive - They are the first company to be in this space and are behind many of the early/current designs.
  * Tenstorrent - This company has Jim Keller and people formerly from Apple’s chip design team and others. They have high performance designs up to 8-wide.
  * Ventana - They claim to have a high performance core design that is 15-wide.
  * AheadComputing - they hired Intel’s Oregon design team to design high performance RISC-V cores after the Royal Core project was cancelled last year.
  * The Raspberry Pi foundation - their RP2350 contains Hazard3 RISC-V cores designed by one of their engineers.
  * Nvidia - They design RISC-V cores for the microcontrollers in their GPUs, of which the GPU System Processor is the most well known. They ship billions of RISC-V cores each year as part of their GPUs. This is despite using ARM for the high end CPUs that they sell to the community.
  * Western Digital - Like Nvidia, they design RISC-V cores for use in their products. They are particularly notable because they released the SweRV Core as open source.
  * Meta - They are making in-house RISC-V based chips for AI training/inference.

This is a short list. It would be relatively easy to assemble a list of dozens of companies designing RISC-V cores outside of China if one tried.