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
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
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 A210
We have even less information about the Zhihe Computing A210, with all details below coming from a post in Chinese on Zhihu social network.
Zhihe A210 key features:
CPU 8-core 64-bit RISC-V CPU Unified Computing Architecture (UCA) with unified memory and unified operators for enhanced computational efficiency. Fully compatible with the RVA23 Profile Up to 12 TOPS (INT8) AI inference capability (they don’t seem to use a separate NPU)
Memory – DDR memory optimized with large-capacity storage to support Mixture of Experts (MoE) model architectures (e.g., DeepSeek).
Target applications include edge server scenarios for video encoding/decoding, encryption/decryption, AI large model inference, and data storage. They want to offer a cost-effective solution that competes against traditional GPU/GPGPU solutions using HBM.
The post on Zhihu appears to focus a lot on RVA23 Profile compliance with support for all 81 mandatory and optional extensions, including Hypervisor, Vector, BF16, CFI, and Sv57. The processor also supports 123 official RISC-V extensions, covering AME, AIA, CoVE, Smmtt, QoS, IOMMU, and RERI. They also highlight the advantages of the RISC-V Vector (RVV) Extension, either matching (or close to it) or outperforming Intel and Arm instructions for tasks like video encoding/decoding, OpenSSL, LLMs, and CRC computation.
I could not find any of the I/Os used by the processor, but it’s probably safe to assume it has a few PCIe Gen4 lanes like the UR-DP1000 above. Zhihe says they’ve completed the fabrication and internal testing, and sample testing applications are open to developers, partners, and customers. The company does not appear to have a website as of July 22, 2025.
SpacemIT K3
SpacemIT is already a known entity in the RISC-V space thanks to K1 and M1 octa-core processors found in products like the Orange Pi R2S board, Banana Pi BPI-CM6 system-on-module, Muse Pi Pro SBC, and others. They must have mentioned the K3 at the RISC-V Summit, but I can’t find any posts about it, and all we know is that the K3 is based on X100 cores, for which we have more details, and are also found in the Vital Stone V100 server SoC.
X100 core specifications:
RVA23 64-bit RISC-V processor
2.5 TOPS @ INT8 AI computing power compliant with RISC-V IME extension
RISC-V Vector 1.0 standard, providing 256-bit vector computing bandwidth
Supports RISC-V Vector Crypto extension
Performance 2.5GHz @ 12nm 9.0 SPECint2006/GHz with SpacemIT LLVM Compiler 7.7 CoreMarks/MHz with SpacemIT LLVM Compiler
Microarchitecture 12-stage four-issue out-of-order execution Multi-core, multi-cluster processor, up to 64 cores Support intra-cluster and inter-cluster consistency Supports virtualization Supports RISC-V Hypervisor extension Supports AIA specification Supports forming a complete virtualization system in combination with IOMMU
Other Server-level Features Support RAS features and RISC-V standard RERI information reporting Capable of providing a secure computing environment and resisting Meltdown and Spectre attacks Support instruction trace for efficient program trajectory tracking
I’d expect more details to surface in the second part of 2025 for the K3, A210, and UR-DP1000 high-performance RISC-V processors. The latter will have hardware ready by fall, likely with WiP software, and the three platforms will likely only become usable sometime in 2026.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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