GoKawiilDarian Domocos told me the hardest part of starting a CPU company wasn’t the engineering; it was getting anyone to believe that two young guys from Romania could do it.
He’s the CEO and co-founder of Fiora5, a startup that develops and licenses RISC-V processor IP out of Europe. That’s where the conversation started before it charged through supply chain politics, why he’s ignoring the datacenter on his path to market, and what he’s reading to keep growing.
Our discussion hit a pretty wide range of topics, from career advice to nation state security.
My three favorite themes from the discussion were:
Winning with RISC-V
We discussed open source instruction sets and how you build a business model around one. Closed systems still have the edge, but given how rapidly the EDA world is changing, and how rapidly the architecture of chips is changing, open source is having a moment. As we discussed with Daniel Schulz in Episode 8 of The Siliconimist, many parts of the silicon model are moving rapidly toward open: as more of the industry builds on it and embraces it, a self-reinforcing cycle starts .
Arm’s advantage is ecosystem maturity, not the instruction set. Toolchain, debugging, integration, forty years of programmer habit. As Darian put it:
“you might have a really amazing RISC-V core, but because you don’t have the auxiliary software it is harder to integrate.”
The unlock is standardization, specifically RVA23, which he called out as the single biggest step RISC-V International has taken.
Sovereignty Through Supply Chain
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