Technology

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'

Source

Tom's Hardware

Published

Apr 23, 2026

TL;DR

AI Generated

Verkor.io's AI system, Design Conductor, autonomously designed a complete RISC-V CPU core from a 219-word spec sheet in just 12 hours, a significantly faster timeline compared to traditional chip design processes. The resulting processor, VerCore, is a five-stage pipelined core that achieved a CoreMark score of 3,261. While the system showed impressive capabilities, it still requires human experts to guide it towards a production-ready chip, and the compute requirements increase non-linearly with design complexity. Verkor plans to release VerCore's RTL source and build scripts soon and showcase an FPGA implementation at the Electronic Design Automation Conference.

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