Will next Supercomputer use RISC-V ?

Khem Raj December 10, 2025 #meta

Approximate Period	Predominant Architecture / Design	Key Characteristics	Examples of CPU/Processor Type
1960s - Late 1970s	Early, Specialized Systems	Highly innovative, compact designs, exploiting local parallelism like pipelining. Small number of processors.	Custom, very fast, dedicated CPUs (e.g., in CDC 6600).
Late 1970s - Early 1990s	Vector Processors (The Cray Era)	Focused on specialized vector processing (performing the same operation on many data points simultaneously) and small-scale shared-memory multiprocessing.	Specialized Vector Processors (e.g., in Cray-1, Cray X-MP, NEC SX series).
Early 1990s - Late 1990s	Massively Parallel Processors (MPP) & RISC-based SMPs	Shift to massive centralized parallelism using a large number of interconnected processors with distributed memory. The processors were often RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) designs.	RISC CPUs like SPARC (e.g., in Fujitsu K computer, CM-5), Alpha (e.g., in Cray T3D/T3E), and PowerPC (e.g., in IBM SP systems).
Early 2000s - Present	Clustered Commodity Processors (x86 & Hybrid Systems)	Dominance of massive distributed parallelism using clusters of high-volume, commercial off-the-shelf servers. Initially based on standard x86 CPUs, then augmented with accelerators.	x86 CPUs (from Intel and AMD) + GPGPUs (e.g., Summit, Frontier) and later non-commodity many-core designs like IBM Power (e.g., Blue Gene, Summit).
Late 2010s - Present	High-Efficiency Custom ARM Systems	Focus on power-efficiency and high memory bandwidth with custom-designed processors based on open architectures, often integrating vector extensions directly into the CPU, minimizing the need for separate accelerators.	Custom ARM CPUs (e.g., Fujitsu A64FX in Fugaku) and specialized Chinese processors (e.g., Sunway SW26010).

We can see progression from custom -> PowerPC and SPARC -> x86 -> ARM over decades. I am predicting next supercomputer will use RISC-V

What is your prediction?