Emir BardakçıQualcomm today officially announced that the company has acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a strategic move to further expand its capabilities in RISC-V technology and strengthen its next-generation CPU roadmap. This should give additional thrust to innovation across custom processor platforms like Oryon and future Snapdragon families.
Strategic Impact on Qualcomm’s CPU Roadmap
This acquisition gives Qualcomm a strong technical foundation to integrate RISC-V innovations with its existing custom CPU architecture. This is targeting the development of more power-efficient, scalable, and secure processors for mobile devices, AI workloads, and data centers.
Qualcomm said Ventana’s RISC-V expertise will directly support a variety of ongoing internal projects, including the internally developed Oryon CPU line. Combining RISC-V’s open and modular design with the performance-focused engineering in Oryon, Qualcomm is working to improve instruction-level efficiency and reduce power consumption across future platforms. This would support multi-year development across smartphones, edge computing hardware, and enterprise-level AI applications.
Key strategic benefits include:
- Better integration between RISC-V and proprietary CPU designs
- Improved low-power and high-performance computing capabilities
- Faster mobile and AI-focused silicon innovation cycles
What this means for flagship devices from Xiaomi
This acquisition has direct implications for Xiaomi’s premium device ecosystem, especially in models built on Qualcomm’s high-end chipsets. Snapdragon 8 Elite, powering advanced platforms, is very closely related to the ongoing Oryon development strategy.
This architectural evolution will, in turn, give way to Xiaomi’s future products, including the Xiaomi 15 series and an expected Xiaomi 17 series. These can translate into better sustained performance, improved AI processing, and more stable gaming and multitasking experiences. Devices with the POCO F7 Ultra and future POCO F8 Ultra, which rely on China-origin flagship platforms adapted for the global market, are also likely to benefit from these CPU-level enhancements.
Expected benefits for the Xiaomi smartphones include:
- Higher sustained performance under heavy workloads
- Improved battery efficiency in AI and gaming scenarios
- More consistent thermals for flagship-class devices
Ventana’s Role in Advancing RISC-V Innovation
Ventana Micro Systems was founded in 2018 and is headquartered at Cupertino. It specializes in developing high-performance, scalable, secure chiplet solutions based on the RISC-V open architecture. The company is an active board member of RISC-V International, contributing to its various technical steering committees and thereby helping define industry-wide standards.
Durga Malladi, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Technology Planning, Edge Solutions, and Data Center Business at Qualcomm, emphasized that RISC-V has great potential for driving further innovation in future CPUs. Balaji Baktha, CEO of Ventana, assured that the team would now work closely with Qualcomm, integrating its expertise into Oryon-based platforms targeting breakthroughs in low-power, high-performance computing for future consumer and enterprise products.
It is expected that this collaboration will drive some roadmaps for Snapdragon platforms used in Xiaomi flagships, especially in AI acceleration and next-generation performance efficiency.
