[pjmlp]

It still requires Android to care about RISC-V, plenty of NDK stuff.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis

Then OSes like HarmonyOS and HarmonyOS NEXT aren't even that relevant outside China.

Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.

[brucehoult]

> Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices

There were still, as recently as 2025, new smartphones being released with only Arm A53 cores from 2012. Low end, obviously, but equally obviously there is a market for them.

RISC-V SoCs passed that performance mark in 2021 and shipping SBCs are currently at the Arm A76 RK3588/Pi 5 level. In flagship phones that was the Samsung Galaxy S10 generation, but there are still today a lot of budget phones using A76 as the primary cores (usually with some A55s too).

Cores are available for licensing up to around the Cortex-X3 level. Someone just has to be interested enough to put them in an SoC.

It's a business question now, not a technology one.

[crote]

> Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.

Or the other way around: the low-end market wants to adopt it due to lower licensing fees, so Android is incentivized to support RISC-V or risk losing that market to a competing platform. Especially in markets with a God App like Wechat something in-between feature phone and smartphone won't be a very hard sell. RISC-V adoption can grow upwards from there.

[pjmlp]

If the chips aren't fast enough to run a JIT and AOT compiler, a concurrent copying generational GC, along with a modern Vulkan implementation, no one would care, they would be better with feature phones at that point.

[0x000xca0xfe]

They are already. I've got the Spacemit K3 and it is a bit below Sandy Bridge single-core speed - so nothing spectacular - but fast enough for everyday desktop use. And way faster than my old budget smartphone's SoC.

Yes RISC-V has not caught up to modern x86/ARM CPUs like Zen 5, Snapdragon or Apple but still fast enough for modern browsers and most software in general.

Already existing RISC-V CPUs are certainly fast enough to build entry level smartphones. It's probably just a matter of time (3-5 years maybe?) until some Chinese company does it.