One you license, one you just use
The RISC-V vs Arm question gets framed as a technology fight, and it mostly is not one. Both are modern RISC instruction sets, and a chip built on either can be quick or slow, cheap or dear. The difference that actually changes your decisions is ownership: Arm is proprietary IP you license and pay royalties on, RISC-V is an open standard you can use for nothing. For anyone building IoT hardware, that gap is the whole story.
Same family, different landlord
Start with what they share, because it is more than the arguments admit. Both are RISC architectures in the proper sense: load-store designs with a lot of registers and a clean, regular instruction encoding. Instruction for instruction they are more alike than they are different, and if you want the ground-up primer, that is what the beginner’s guide to RISC-V is for. The thing that separates them is not the silicon. It is who owns the rulebook, and what they charge you to read it.
How Arm makes its money
Arm does not manufacture chips. It designs processor cores, owns the architecture, and licenses that intellectual property to everyone else. There are two ways in. You can license a ready-made core, a Cortex-M for a microcontroller or a Cortex-A for something meatier, and drop it into your system-on-chip. Or, if you are Apple or Qualcomm and have the budget and the engineers, you take an architecture licence and design your own custom core that speaks Arm but shares none of Arm’s internals.
Either way, the meter runs. You pay an up-front licence fee for access, then a royalty on every single chip you ship, with the newer ARMv9 architecture carrying higher rates than what came before. That model built an empire: Arm sits in the overwhelming majority of the world’s smartphones. It also means one company sets the terms, owns the roadmap, and decides the price, and when it fancies changing any of that, licensees tend to find out rather than get asked.
Arm’s strength and Arm’s catch are the same fact: one company owns it. That gives you a single, coherent, superbly supported architecture, and a single landlord who can raise the rent.
How RISC-V changes the deal
Nobody owns the RISC-V instruction set. It is an open specification under a permissive licence, stewarded rather than owned by RISC-V International, and it is free to implement with no royalty attached. You can design your own core from scratch, grab an open-source one, or buy a proprietary one off a vendor, and all of them speak the same instruction set. There is no architecture fee flowing to a licensor and no per-unit royalty on the ISA itself. Crucially, there is no single company that can wake up one morning and rewrite your commercial terms.
Two ways to get a CPU into your product
RISC-V vs Arm at a glance
| Dimension | RISC-V | Arm |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Open standard, stewarded by RISC-V International (non-profit) | Proprietary, owned by Arm Holdings |
| Cost to use the ISA | Free, royalty-free | Up-front licence fee plus royalty per chip |
| Custom instructions | Add your own extensions freely | Only via an architecture licence, within Arm’s rules |
| Ecosystem maturity | Younger, growing quickly | Decades deep, vast tooling and software |
| Software and OS support | Good and improving (Linux, Zephyr, common RTOSes) | Effectively universal |
| Vendor lock-in | Low, many independent suppliers | Single licensor sets the terms |
| Where it leads today | Embedded, IoT microcontrollers, edge, rising fast | Mobile (99%+ of smartphones), huge embedded base |
What it actually means for IoT
On paper the royalty sounds trivial. On a sensor node with a bill of materials measured in cents and a production run measured in millions, a per-unit ISA royalty is a real line that scales with your success. RISC-V simply deletes that line. Add the freedom to bolt on your own domain-specific instructions, for edge AI or signal processing, without asking a licensor’s permission, and the case for high-volume, cost-sensitive, custom silicon writes itself. Throw in a field of independent vendors rather than one, and you get supply-chain and geopolitical resilience into the bargain.
Now the other side of the ledger, because there is one. Arm’s ecosystem is decades deep. Compilers, debuggers, operating systems, reference designs, and a labour market full of engineers who already speak it fluently. For a great many teams, Arm remains the boring, safe, it-just-works default, and boring is worth a lot when you are trying to ship a product this quarter rather than pioneer an architecture. RISC-V has closed a lot of that gap, but “closing” is not “closed”, and the maturity difference is the honest reason plenty of designs still pick Arm.
So which one wins?
Neither, and that is the correct answer rather than a fence-sitting one. Arm owns mobile and a colossal embedded install base and is going precisely nowhere. RISC-V is winning where its advantages bite hardest and its ecosystem is already good enough: microcontrollers, IoT endpoints, and edge accelerators, exactly the parts of the market IoT Portal cares about most. The genuinely interesting question is not which is better in the abstract, but whether RISC-V can climb out of its strongholds and into Arm’s, and that is a big enough question to deserve its own post.
RISC-V vs Arm is not a spec sheet showdown. It is open versus owned. Pick RISC-V when cost, customisation and independence matter most. Pick Arm when a mature, universal ecosystem matters more. For a lot of IoT designs, that choice now genuinely goes either way, which is new.
Last updated 6 August 2026. Sources: Arm’s licensing model (up-front licence fee plus per-chip royalty, with core licences and architecture licences as the two main tiers) per Arm and industry analysis; Arm reports its designs in over 99% of smartphones; the RISC-V ISA is open and royalty-free per RISC-V International.
