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The Blog
July 07, 2026<br>RISC-V EU Summit 2026: An Ecosystem Coming of Age
Reflections on the Summit
I recently returned from the RISC-V Europe Summit 2026 in Bologna and, like many attendees, I came away energized by the announcements, the technical discussions and the sheer number of people building products around RISC-V. But the thing that struck me most wasn’t a particular processor, benchmark, board or product launch. It was the change in the conversation itself. A few years ago, many discussions around RISC-V centred on potential. What could it become? Which markets might it disrupt? Which software stacks might eventually arrive? In Bologna, the conversation felt fundamentally different. Now, the discussion was about execution. Which platforms are shipping? Which software stacks are production ready? How do we scale from embedded systems into AI, automotive, mobile, cloud and datacenter deployments?
As someone who spent sixteen years at Arm helping build platforms, software ecosystems and industry partnerships before joining SiFive, that shift resonated deeply with me. One of the lessons I learned during those years is that processors matter but in the end robust ecosystems determine success. Software architecture. Developer experience. Shared investment. Community alignment. Those are the signals I look for when trying to understand where an ecosystem is heading.
They were everywhere in Bologna.
This blog is a personal reflection inspired by RISC-V Europe Summit 2026. I wanted to capture observations on the maturation of the RISC-V software ecosystem through the perspective of someone who spent many years helping build the software ecosystem at Arm and is now helping drive the future through SiFive and RISE.
Section Summary
Executive Summary
The Most Exciting Thing Wasn’t a Product
Software Has Become the Main Story
Open Source Software Is Becoming the Architectural Language
Common Targets Create Confidence
AI Is Raising the Bar for the Entire Ecosystem
Ecosystems Mature When They Start Prioritising
Looking Through an Arm Lense
Leaving Bologna Optimistic
The Most Exciting Thing Wasn’t a Product
One of my favorite aspects of the week wasn’t any individual keynote or product announcement. It was the conversations between sessions. You would leave a talk on Android readiness, find yourself discussing firmware architecture over coffee, walk into a session on AI software, then spend lunch talking about virtualization, security or developer tooling. Those conversations often involved people from completely different parts of the ecosystem. Silicon vendors. Commercial software companies. Open-source maintainers. Linux developers. Hyperscalers. Standards bodies.
Increasingly, everyone seemed to be talking about the same problems. That may sound like a small observation. I don’t think it is. Healthy ecosystems eventually converge on a common understanding of the challenges that matter most. The history of computing is full of technically capable architectures that struggled because the software...