There are plenty of RISC-V cores available on the market for SoC vendors to license and use. So many that they even outnumber the SoCs using them.
Several RISC-V SoC vendors design their own cores and license those core designs out for other vendors to use in their own SoCs (T-Head, SpacemiT, Tenstorrent), some are focused entirely on core designs that they sell and don’t currently make SoCs themselves (SiFive, etc.), and countless open-source RISC-V cores exist online.
StarFive, ESWIN, and Sophgo are some of the companies that make RISC-V processors/SoCs but which don’t actually “design it from the ground up” since they license the CPU core design from either SiFive or T-Head. Similar to how most ARM SoC vendors license the ARM Cortex CPU cores.
There are plenty of RISC-V cores available on the market for SoC vendors to license and use. So many that they even outnumber the SoCs using them.
Several RISC-V SoC vendors design their own cores and license those core designs out for other vendors to use in their own SoCs (T-Head, SpacemiT, Tenstorrent), some are focused entirely on core designs that they sell and don’t currently make SoCs themselves (SiFive, etc.), and countless open-source RISC-V cores exist online.
StarFive, ESWIN, and Sophgo are some of the companies that make RISC-V processors/SoCs but which don’t actually “design it from the ground up” since they license the CPU core design from either SiFive or T-Head. Similar to how most ARM SoC vendors license the ARM Cortex CPU cores.