Three high-performance RISC-V processors to watch in H2 2025

Summary

Some high-performance RISC-V processors are in the pipeline for the rest of the year 2025, namely UltraRISC UR-DP1000, Zhihe A210, and SpacemIT K3. We currently have limited information about each of those processors, but let’s see what information we can gather from the web, mostly as a result of the recent RISC-V Summit in China.UltraRISC UR-DP1000 – Octa-core 64-bit RISC-V SoC UR-DP1000 Block Diagram The first SoC is the UR-DP1000 octa-core from UltraRISC (the website loads slowly, and I could not find anything about the UR-DP1000 there). It will be used in Shenzhen Milk-V Technology’s Titan mini-ITX motherboard, and Sipeed also posted the slide above on X.Preliminary UR-RP1000 specifications: CPU 8x 64-bit RISC-V UR-CP100 “RV64GCBHX” cores up to 2.0 GHz Two 4x core cluster design with 4MB L3 cache each, and a total of 16MB cache. SPECCPU2006 single-core INT @ 10.4/GHz; single-core FP @ 12/GHz Fully RVA22 compliant, and “Compliant with RVA23 excluding V extension.” Supports Hardware Virtualization, RISC-V RV64 ISA H(v1.0) Extension Memory – UDIMM DDR4-3200 ECC memory support, up to 64GB Networking – GMAC High-speed expansion interfaces 1x PCIe 4.0 x16 2x PCIe 4.0 x4 Other I/Os – 1x QSPI, 2x SPI, 4x I2C, 4x UART, 40x GPIO, eSPI/LPC Titan motherboard renderings Many features will have to rely on the PCIe interfaces, and for instance, the Titan motherboard also offers four USB 3.0 ports, which must have been implemented through a PCIe to USB 3.0 bridge. It will have UEFI firmware with support for ACPI, CPPC, SMBIOS, and the ability to boot RISC-V ISO images from Debian, Ubuntu, openEuler, Centos, Deepin, Feroda Remix, and other operating systems. The plan is also to have mainline Linux support by Q4 2026.The Titan mini-ITX motherboard is still under development, but can be booked now for $5, and purchased for $279 once it becomes available in about three months. It’s not sure whether that price includes the $50 discount promised or not.Zhihe A210We have even less in...