The State of Silicon and Devices – Q2 2025 Roundup

Welcome to the Q2 2025 edition of the State of Silicon and Devices by Canonical. In this quarter, we have seen momentum accelerate in edge computing, as well as growing interest in hardware platforms designed for AI, automation, and long-term maintainability. From Ubuntu Desktop arriving on Qualcomm’s Dragonwing processors, to demonstrations of RISC-V silicon running open-source LLMs, it’s clear the ecosystem is evolving toward performance, efficiency, and openness at the edge. 

In the quarter’s roundup, we will provide a brief summary of some of the major announcements from the past quarter, and help you to understand the underlying market trends they represent. Let’s begin by assessing how partnerships between silicon and OS vendors help downstream users within the context of cybersecurity mandates.

Silicon partnerships for mature compliance posture 

As the implementation timeline for the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) progresses, device makers across the embedded and IoT ecosystem are under increased pressure to ensure long-term software maintenance, security patching, and compliance reporting across their fleets. According to the Linux Foundation’s 2025 CRA Readiness Report, the majority of device manufacturers are still uncertain about how they will meet CRA obligations, with 63% mentioning they “do not yet plan to contribute security fixes once CRA goes into effect.” This is concerning, as neglecting the responsibility risks creating a fragmented, insecure device landscape that undermines user trust and regulatory compliance. As the CRA makes clear, software maintenance is not an optional activity. OEMs and ODMs who don’t treat this as  a priority, risk paying a later price in terms of legal, commercial, and reputational risk.

In this context, partnerships that bring together silicon, software, and lifecycle services are gaining traction. These partnerships bring together the different aspects of the device lifecycle, and given that the CRA mandates that manufacturers are responsible for the entire lifecycle of connected products, these partnerships are a welcome development. 

What do these partnerships entail? As an example, earlier in April, Renesas joined the Canonical Silicon Partner Program, delivering optimized Ubuntu images for the RZ family of MPUs. This integration gives OEMs/ODMs streamlined access to the production-grade Ubuntu ecosystem, from snaps and cloud-native tools to a robust stream of security updates, on RZ-based platforms. By bundling Ubuntu Pro with Renesas’ AI-accelerated hardware, developers can accelerate time-to-market for robotics, smart cameras, and industrial automation, while strengthening their compliance posture in light of the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

Despite the move towards integrated partnerships, many established device manufacturers, startups and individuals alike still rely on in-house teams to maintain their  Linux builds. This is particularly concerning given the CRA’s stringent requirements. Let’s learn more about it, in the context of Yocto.

Yocto Project 5.2 “Walnascar” arrives 

The Yocto Project shipped its 5.2.0 release in April 2025, featuring key upstream components like Linux kernel 6.12, GCC 14.2, glibc 2.41, LLVM 19.1.7, and over 300 additional recipe upgrades. Yocto is widely adopted in the embedded Linux ecosystem, as it offers unparalleled flexibility for developers who need full control over every aspect of their system, from bootloaders to userland packages. Its recipe-based approach allows for deep customization, making it a popular choice for highly specialized or resource-constrained devices.

However, this flexibility comes at a cost: Yocto-based systems require substantial in-house expertise to maintain, particularly over the long lifespans typical of industrial or embedded deployments. Managing updates across a bespoke Linux stack can be error-prone. A single failed update may result in device instability, necessitating costly site visits or product recalls. In the context of the CRA, these challenges become even more pronounced.

Yocto users should ensure all components are regularly patched, dependencies are secure, and update mechanisms are robust, which adds significant operational overhead. As CRA compliance drives greater scrutiny around software maintenance and security, organizations will need to reevaluate the balance between bespokeness and maintenance, and potentially explore alternatives with long-term support and simplified update models to ensure product viability over time.

Let’s now move closer to the hardware, and see how the open ISA RISC-V keeps making waves in the ecosystem.

DeepSeek Demo on ESWIN’s EIC77 RISC-V series

Global interest in RISC-V is accelerating, as the open-standard architecture holds the promise of revolutionising computing by enabling developers to customize, scale, and innovate faster. According to recent projections, RISC-V shipments will surpass 16 billion chips by 2030. That said, some challenges remain. Among those, the RISC-V ecosystem must be able to rely on a commercial-grade OS, tooling, and lifecycle support, just like mainstream architectures. 

Canonical is deeply invested in making RISC-V commercially viable, from upstream enablement and reference board support to OTA updates for security. We’ve been supporting RISC-V for a few years now – for example, by contributing upstream, enabling reference boards, – but this quarter we wanted to take advantage of recent market developments in the LLM space. 

At RISC-V Summit Europe, we recently demonstrated the DeepSeek LLM 7B model running on ESWIN Computing’s EIC77 series SoC, featuring SiFive P550 cores alongside integrated NPU, GPU, and DSP accelerators. The live demo, which achieved approximately 7 tokens per second on the EIC7700X EVB, highlighted the ability of modern RISC-V platforms to support advanced NLP inference using open-source software stacks. The achieved throughput is relevant for embedded and edge environments, where resource constraints and power efficiency are scarce.

We believe Ubuntu’s availability on RISC-V hardware underlines its role as the go-to OS for next-gen ISA adoption. By bringing production-quality Ubuntu images to platforms like the EIC77, we want to close the gap between development and deployable products, accelerating RISC-V’s shipments to production.

Moving away from RISC-V, mature ecosystem players like Qualcomm recently made announcements over the course of the past quarter. Let’s unpack them in more detail.

Canonical’s first Ubuntu Desktop image for Qualcomm Dragonwing

This quarter, we released a public beta of Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop for Qualcomm’s Dragonwing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors, marking the first official Ubuntu Desktop experience on this IoT-focused platform. The QCS5430 processors are mid-tier IoT solutions that combine premium connectivity, high-level performance, and edge AI-powered camera capabilities specifically for robotics, industrial handhelds, retail, cameras, and drone applications. On the other hand, the QCS6490 processors focus on 5G connectivity, scalable performance, multi-camera support, and versatile I/O for transportation and logistics, smart warehousing, retail and manufacturing. The Ubuntu image brings GPU-accelerated graphics, multimedia support, sensor integration, and on-device ML into a unified desktop environment for vision kits and industrial displays. By enabling broader hardware reach, we are extending Ubuntu Desktop beyond PCs and into Qualcomm’s embedded and industrial IoT devices, empowering developers with a familiar UI and trusted update channels. 

Credit: https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/software/ubuntu-on-qualcomm-iot-platforms

The move reflects a broader trend in the embedded market, one which goes beyond Canonical: the convergence of traditional GUI workloads with AI inference at the edge. This is driven by a rapid growth of edge computing and AI deployments. For instance, IDC estimates that global spending on edge computing solutions will grow by 13.8%, reaching nearly $380 billion by 2028. The convergence of traditional GUI workloads with AI inference reflects a need to keep up this pace, as developers work better when they have a single platform from prototyping to deployment. Taking the example of Ubuntu images for Dragonwing, developers can work with the same underlying operating system, packages, tooling and libraries on their desktops, servers, in the cloud, and edge computing devices.

AMD Adaptive and Embedded Computing – new Ubuntu Images

This quarter also saw the release of new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Desktop and Server images for the full range of AMD Kria System-On-Module (SOM) boards, which are Adaptive Computing systems that include an AMD FPGA alongside the CPU.  AMD has a range of systems for different purposes, aimed at markets such as IoT, automotive, industrial control, medical devices, and other embedded-system applications.  (Ubuntu images here:  https://ubuntu.com/download/amd )

FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are interesting because they operate like a “programmable CPU” – hence the “adaptive” part of adaptive computing.  They can be programmed for specific tasks like video or signal processing, cryptography, networking, or many other tasks that require high-speed parallel processing in a much more efficient and speedy fashion than doing it on a normal CPU.  They’re a flexible way to achieve optimal performance in specific tasks that might otherwise require a custom-designed chip to accomplish.

In the IoT space though, it’s never quite as simple as that.  Manufacturers like AMD often provide a reference design or developer board that ODMs use for R&D and prototyping, or a SOM (System On Module) like the Kria that can be used as a development board or integrated directly into a finished product as-is.  

However after prototyping with such a system, many ODMs opt to design their own boards that are based on the same chip sets as the reference design, but customized to their specific needs with added or removed hardware, different form factors, and so forth.  In these cases, we often engage with those customers to integrate any unique drivers or features for their designs in a customized and fully-security-maintained version of Ubuntu that can be used for production deployments, using the reference platform image as a starting point.  You’ve probably run across many devices with embedded computers running Ubuntu and didn’t even know it!  With regulatory changes such as the EU Cyber Resiliency Act coming into force starting in September 2026, long-term security maintenance of any internet-connected device will be mandatory, and that’s driving a lot of interest in commercially-supported solutions like Ubuntu. 

Concluding remarks

This quarter reinforced ongoing trends, as edge computing is maturing rapidly, and hardware vendors are moving toward platforms that support on-device intelligence with streamlined development. From embedded RISC-V chips running LLMs to automotive SoCs designed for over-the-air updates and regulatory compliance, we believe the foundation of future compute is open-source. Canonical remains committed to enabling this shift with trusted, production-grade Linux that spans from cloud to edge, across all major silicon ecosystems.