Condor goes extinct
+High-end RISC-V developer Condor Computing has shut down, confirms David Harold at JPR. The company’s technology and some staff are folding into Andes, Condor’s main backer and a leading RISC-V licensor. The startup was one of several companies designing server-class RISC-V cores and, according to Harold, ran into technical and business problems.
As we described last year (see https://xpu.pub/2025/08/25/condor-cuzco/), Condor implemented an unusual instruction-scheduling approach. Instead of dynamically selecting ready-to-run instructions to issue, the company’s Cuzco CPU used knowledge of previously issued instructions to schedule subsequent ones. The company also evenly divided execution units into four groups, minimizing the size of bypass circuits and thereby speeding them up for dependent operations handled locally.
Andes and Condor haven’t stated whether these unusual aspects of the design contributed to Cuzco delays and performance misses. CPU performance also depends on design aspects that lie beneath the water line, such as branch-prediction and data-prefetch schemes. Two designs that look similar on paper can perform differently.
As for business problems, demand for RISC-V server-class CPUs has yet to materialize. A strong order book would’ve justified Condor and Andes overcoming whatever technical problems Cuzco faced. The market appears to have more suppliers than customers. Meanwhile, x86 and Arm suppliers are executing well enough to depress demand for an alternative architecture.
