RISC-V Hits a Tipping Point

Amidst typical yearly upgrades of licensable CPUs and DSPs, one conclusion appears inescapable: RISCV is finally getting respect—not only from newcomers but also from established players. The other typical players are still as strong as ever, but in 2023, the balance started to shift.

Over the last year, Arm put out new embedded and prime cores, Cadence and Ceva updated their offerings, and Imagination launched three GPUs. But, especially towards the end of the year, the RISCV announcements piled up across the full range of performance. One RISCV CPU may even outperform its Arm counterpart—a first for the upstart instruction-set architecture (ISA). By the end of the year, only one major CPU licensor remained without a RISCV offering.

Cadence did more than just upgrade DSPs; it refreshed its underlying Xtensa platform prior to moving HiFi, Vision, MathX, and ConnX DSPs onto it, bringing the entire line up to date. Imagination, meanwhile, updated the top, middle, and bottom of its line. The big GPU news in 2022 was ray tracing, which Imagination spearheaded. It’s achieved little traction so far, perhaps owing to the time necessary for developers to write it into their games, but this year focused on more prosaic GPU features.