RISC-V in 2025: Open Hardware Goes Mainstream

RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture (ISA) — unlike x86 (Intel/AMD) and ARM (which requires licensing), RISC-V is royalty-free and publicly specified. That freedom has attracted chip designers, researchers, and an entire ecosystem that has accelerated sharply since 2023.

Why RISC-V Matters

The traditional computing ISA duopoly (x86 and ARM) requires royalty payments, licensing agreements, and architectural compliance. RISC-V eliminates these barriers:

• Anyone can design a RISC-V processor without paying licensing fees
• Designs can be fully audited — no black-box microcode
• Custom extensions can be added for domain-specific needs (cryptography, ML inference, DSP)
• Chip independence for nations and companies wanting supply chain sovereignty

What Is Actually Shipping in 2025

SpacemiT K1 (Banana Pi BPI-F3)

The most capable RISC-V Linux board widely available. The K1 is an octa-core RISC-V chip with a vector extension unit. Performance is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 3 in integer workloads, but it runs full Debian Linux with reasonable desktop performance.

Price: ~€35 for the board.

StarFive JH7110 (VisionFive 2)

An established platform that has been on the market since late 2022 and has strong Debian and Fedora support. A good choice if you want a mature Linux ecosystem rather than bleeding-edge hardware.

Milk-V Pioneer (SG2042)

64 RISC-V cores in a desktop form factor. This is a development platform, not a consumer product — but it demonstrates that RISC-V is no longer constrained to microcontrollers and embedded applications.

Microcontrollers

This is where RISC-V has fully arrived. The ESP32-C3 and ESP32-C6 from Espressif use RISC-V cores, and WCH's CH32V series offers extremely cheap RISC-V MCUs (some as low as €0.10 in bulk) with full open-source toolchains.

The Linux Support Reality

Running Linux on RISC-V in 2025 is practical but not effortless:

• Kernel support has improved dramatically — 6.x kernels have solid RISC-V support
• OpenJDK, Python, Rust, Go, and Node.js all run natively
• Proprietary software (Chrome, most games, some Electron apps) remains x86/ARM-only
• Firefox runs, Chromium builds work, but expect occasional build failures

For a developer doing backend work, it is usable. For desktop productivity, you will hit walls.

The Laptop Question

In 2025, the first RISC-V laptops are appearing. The DeepComputing DC-ROMA Laptop II uses the SpacemiT K1 and is targeted at developers. Do not buy it expecting a productivity machine — it is a developer kit with a clamshell shell. Battery life is short, performance is modest.

A genuinely usable RISC-V laptop for daily work is probably 2–3 years away.

Why You Should Pay Attention

Even if RISC-V is not your daily driver today, the ecosystem is on a trajectory that mirrors where ARM was in 2012–2015. In ten years, dismissing RISC-V will look as shortsighted as dismissing ARM servers before AWS Graviton.

For embedded and IoT work, RISC-V microcontrollers are already the rational choice at the low end of the cost curve. For SBC experimentation, a VisionFive 2 or BPI-F3 is a worthwhile addition to any lab.