ARM's Licensing Shift Is the Best Accelerant RISC-V Never Had to Build Itself

Picture a heist where the vault opens itself. That is roughly what is happening in processor architecture right now. RISC-V has spent more than a decade making a careful, disciplined technical case for open-source chip design. It has arrived with solid credentials: no licensing fees, a modular instruction set, and the flexibility to scale from a microcontroller smaller than your thumbnail all the way up to high-performance computing clusters. And yet, one of the most powerful accelerants for RISC-V adoption is not coming from the RISC-V community at all. It is coming from the business decisions of ARM, the architecture that currently owns the mobile chip market and much of the embedded world.

What the ARM Business Model Actually Is, and

Why It Creates Pressure Before you can understand why ARM's licensing strategy matters for RISC-V, you need to understand what ARM actually sells. ARM does not manufacture chips. It designs instruction set architectures and processor cores, then licenses that intellectual property to semiconductor manufacturers in return for licensing revenue. Haruyuki Tago, Edge Evangelist at HACARUS' Tokyo R&D center, describes this model directly in his analysis for the company's AI Lab series, noting that ARM's business is built on licensing IP to chip makers. For years, this arrangement worked beautifully for everyone involved. A company that wanted a capable, power-efficient processor core could license an ARM Cortex design, integrate it into their system-on-chip, and ship a product backed by one of the most mature toolchain ecosystems in the industry. The risk was low. The path was known. The friction enters when the terms of that arrangement shift. When the cost, accessibility, or conditions of ARM licensing change, every chip designer in the world has to run the same calculation: is the value of the ARM ecosystem worth whatever the new arrangement requires? For many, especially in embedded systems, IoT, and specialized compute, the honest answer is increasingly: maybe not. That recalculation is exactly the opening RISC-V has been waiting for, not because RISC-V suddenly became more capable overnight, but because the relative cost of switching dropped. This is how market transitions actually happen. It is rarely the underdog getting dramatically better. It is usually the incumbent making the alternative look more reasonable by comparison.

The Architecture Under

the Hood To appreciate why RISC-V can plausibly absorb designers who are reconsidering ARM, you need to understand what the open architecture actually offers at a technical level. RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley in 2010, according to the Research Development and Innovation Authority's February 2025 report titled "RISC-V: The Open Revolution." That same report describes the architecture's core design philosophy: a minimal base ISA that can be extended with optional feature modules for different computing needs. The base instruction set supports 32-bit, 64-bit, and 128-bit word sizes, while standard extensions enable floating-point arithmetic, atomic operations, and vector processing. In practical terms, this means a chip designer can take the RISC-V base, add only the extensions their application requires, and ship a processor that does exactly what they need without carrying the weight of instructions nobody in their product will ever execute. This modularity is not just an architectural curiosity. It is a genuine engineering advantage in domains where every transistor counts, including embedded systems, IoT devices, and AI inference hardware. The RDIA report notes that RISC-V scales effectively from simple microcontrollers to high-performance computing systems, and that current implementations demonstrate competitive performance with established architectures, particularly in power-efficient applications. The same report is candid about where the gaps remain: x86 processors typically outperform RISC-V in single-threaded workloads. That honesty is useful, because it tells you exactly which territory RISC-V has already secured and which it still needs to earn. Shreyas Sharma's comprehensive comparison on Wevolver, last updated in February 2025, frames the competition around three axes: openness, customization, and innovation. RISC-V wins clearly on the first two. The third is still being contested.

The Numbers Behind

the Momentum Market signal confirmation comes from the growth data. According to Bao Tran, a patent attorney writing for PatentPC in March 2026, the RISC-V market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 30 percent between 2023 and 2030. To put that in context: a 30 percent CAGR in a mature semiconductor industry is not a rounding error. It is a structural shift. Tran's framing is direct: this kind of growth is not common in mature industries like semiconductors, and it means companies are betting big on RISC-V's future. For learners studying chip architecture, this number is worth memorizing not because it signals hype, but because it signals where engineering jobs, open-source tooling investment, and curriculum development are all heading. The hardware community has already started stress-testing RISC-V in the real world. YouTube creator Jeff Geerling, whose channel has over 1,070,000 subscribers, published a hands-on evaluation of the Milk-V Mars CM in November 2023, a RISC-V board designed to be a physical drop-in replacement for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. His title told the whole story: "RISC-V isn't killing Arm (yet)." The board required significant effort to boot, and Geerling spent measurable time just exploring PCIe functionality on the JH7110 chip. The conclusion was not a dismissal. It was a progress report. The form factor fit. The ecosystem needed work. That gap between "physically compatible" and "fully ready" is exactly the distance RISC-V is currently closing, and it is closing faster as more engineers are pushed toward the platform by licensing economics rather than pulled by pure enthusiasm.

What This Means

for Learners and Builders Here is the part that matters for anyone studying hardware design, embedded systems, or computer architecture right now. The RISC-V ISA is free to study, free to implement, and free to extend. There is no licensing gate between a learner and a complete understanding of how a modern processor ISA works. You can read the full specification, simulate a RISC-V core in software, synthesize one on an FPGA, and submit contributions to open-source implementations, all without signing a license agreement or paying a royalty. That accessibility is educationally significant in a way that no proprietary architecture can match. The competitive pressure from ARM's licensing strategy is, counterintuitively, one of the best things that could have happened to RISC-V's long-term adoption curve. Market forces are doing what a decade of technical evangelism alone could not: making open-source processor design the pragmatic choice, not just the principled one. For students and early-career engineers, the practical implication is clear. RISC-V literacy is becoming infrastructure knowledge, the kind of foundational skill that will show up in job postings, research grants, and silicon design courses with increasing frequency over the next several years. The architecture has earned its credibility through 10-plus years of incremental technical work. The market is now handing it a megaphone. Learning RISC-V today is not getting ahead of a trend; it is getting in front of a structural shift while the tooling is still young enough that your contributions actually matter.