The global semiconductor landscape has reached a historic inflection point as the open-source RISC-V architecture officially secured 25% market penetration this month, signaling the end of the long-standing architectural monopoly held by proprietary giants. This milestone, verified by industry analysts in late December 2025, marks a seismic shift in how the world’s most advanced hardware is designed, licensed, and deployed. Driven by a collective industry push for “architectural sovereignty,” RISC-V has evolved from an academic experiment into the cornerstone of the next generation of computing.
I never got the hype from Open source supporters about RISC-V. Its a permissive license so any consumer use will end up with companies EEE into there own product line (Could you then patent that architecture?). Weirdly I feel like the ARM model where a central company licenses the chipset out to many companies is kind of better as atleast you get competition between chip designers. Main benefit here is companies who don’t have to pay licenses for the architecture