Comment by brucehoult

At the December 2022 RISC-V Summit it was announced that there were now at least 10 billion RISC-V cores in the world -- pretty rapid for an ISA whose formal spec was published only 3 1/2 years earlier.

It's probably 20-30 billion by now.

And actually no one really knows the total because no one is required to report that they are using RISC-V, let alone sales or production numbers.

It comes down to adding up those companies that have said. WD/Sandisk are shipping several billion a year, and started early (even before the formal spec). Samsung said in 2019 that the Galaxy S20 had two RISC-V cores in every phone. They are now publicly known to be porting their Tizen OS and the DotNet language execution environment to RISC-V, for use in TVs and "other unspecified products". They ship quite a lot of stuff. LG are also known to be switching to RISC-V. Qualcomm have a handful of headline Arm applications processors in chips such as the Snapdragon series, and possibly a dozen or more unannounced RISC-V CPUs in the same chips.

But "displacement" does not mean installed base of CPUs or even current sales of CPUs in existing products. It is not even about new products that use existing chips.

"Displacement" means the proportion of new chip design wins, which over the long term feed through to the above measures.

Both Andes and SiFive have probably individually (and certainly combined) for several years now had more new design wins for CPUs in new chips than Arm.

There are an increasing number of formerly skeptical manufacturers putting both an Arm core and a RISC-V core in the same chip, the most well-known example recently being Raspberry Pi, a company that is simply full of ex-Arm and Arm-centric Broadcom employees.