AI agent designs a complete RISC-V CPU from a 219-word spec sheet in just 12 hours — comparably simple design required 'many tens of billions of tokens'

Tom’s Hardware ^ | 4.23.2026 | Luke James

[libh8er]

AI chip design startup Verkor.io claims, in a research paper published in March, that its agentic AI system, Design Conductor, autonomously produced a complete RISC-V CPU core — taking a 219-word requirements document and generating a verified, layout-ready design in 12 hours, which is orders of magnitude faster than the standard 18- to 36-month timelines seen in commercial chip design.

This is the first time an autonomous agent has built a working CPU from spec to GDSII layout file, according to Verkor. The resulting processor — VerCore — is a five-stage pipelined, in-order, single-issue core that met timing at 1.48 GHz on the ASAP7 7nm process design kit, scoring 3,261 on the CoreMark benchmark.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy
KEYWORDS: ai; designconductor; riscv; vercore; verkor

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

--- "...claims, in a research paper"....

Start up looking for venture capital investment.

If they had a whiz-bang, almost ready-to-market product.....

[Red Badger]

[fruser1]

spec to GDSII layout file

Nice. Now, manufacture and test it. Let us know how it works out.

[HYPOCRACY]

AI can’t even give me proper instructions to organize my CRM. It says sorry more than a philandering husband.

[Frank Drebin]

Indeed. Looking for a seat on the gravy train, if there are any left. It’s getting tight.

[Repeal The 17th]

‘many tens of billions of tokens’

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

---- "Indeed. Looking for a seat on the gravy train, if there are any left. It's getting tight."

Looked up their address --- a PO Box in Mountain View. Bottom of their page....

211 Hope St, P.O. Box 390067, Mountain View, CA US

[dfwgator]

How much water and electricity was consumed.

I also just heard that fairly soon you will have to pay $100/month to use Claude Code. Right now I just pay $200/year. They sucker you in, then hit you with the price increases.

[Dr. Sivana]

AI can’t even give me proper instructions to organize my CRM.

Some AIs are better for certain tasks than others. You used a different tool for a different purpose.

[omni-scientist]

This makes me wonder about something that’s been on my mind lately: Since so much (practically all) human knowledge has been integrated into AI datasets, including patents, what is to prevent an AI task from violating existing in-force patents?

[Jan_Sobieski]

Moore’s law is going vertical…

[catnipman]

and obviously, this AI just copied and pasted together bits and pieces from public documentation of designs produced by human engineers ... so even if was manufacturable and worked, would it be an improvement over other CPUs in terms of performance and/or energy consumption?

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

Reading the link to IEEE Spectrum, one finds:

Verkor says this puts VerCore’s performance in line with the CPU core performance of Intel’s Celeron SU2300. Whether that sounds impressive depends on your perspective. The Celeron SU2300, which arrived in 2011, uses Intel’s Penryn CPU architecture, which debuted in November of 2007

This is a "might possibly me" moment. And while seemingly "new," it's a decade and more old. Just faster.

[SunkenCiv]

The rest of the keyword, sorted:

• RISC-V 2026 Update [20:48] [04/21/2026]
• Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes [02/06/2026]
• Could RISC-V become a force in high performance computing? [02/08/2023]
• RISC-V Summit 2022: All Your CPUs Belong to Us [01/04/2023]
• Why Intel x86 will DIE sooner than you think! (RIP 1978-2022) [07/03/2021]
• Microsoft Is Rethinking Windows 11 Minimum Requirement For These Popular AMD And Intel CPUs [06/30/2021]
• RISC-V is trying to launch an open-hardware revolution [05/11/2021]
• IBM Unveils World's First 2 Nanometer Chip Technology [05/10/2021]
• SiFive Unveils Freedom Platforms for RISC-V-Based Semi-Custom Chips [07/24/2016]

[HYPOCRACY]

It’s the CRMs home AI. So I think it is designed for that.

[Resolute Conservative]

Exactly. Machines making machines.

[Dr. Sivana]

It’s the CRMs home AI. So I think it is designed for that.

Perhaps, but I would suggest that AIs are better at some things than others. The rules for making a RISC-V chip are unambiguous, and described in a way that can inherently be implemented by a computer program. A CRM, depending on the source data especially, may be necessarily more interpretive. Some of the functions may be more open-ended than a typical instruction for a RISC-V chip design (e.g. create a trace that avoids the other traces, using the shorted direct route to the desired endpoint.) Or it could be that the designers of the CRM ai did not do as good a job as the designers of the RISC-V design ai.

Your point is well taken. I have posted entire threads of general purpose AIs botching VERY straightforward tasks, and still have to check its work, though they have gotten better.

[Bobalu]

Just think, from the earliest creation of simple logic gates all this has sprung!

From Tesla’s discovery of the simple AND gate while controlling a remote controlled model boat in Central park NYC... in the 1890’s

Then later to Alan Turing’s amazing 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” which describes the Universal Computing Machine idea, or the general computer with stored program.

From such simple beginnings to what we have today, and what is to come will astonish the entire world.

[pas]

So they took an existing design document and it created it to those specs.