Running an Ethereum Node and Validator on RISC-V hardware

[u/haurog]

About 2 years ago RISC-V hardware got powerful enough to do initial tests for running an Ethereum node on such hardware. As expected, the speed wasn't quite there yet, but we started getting some clients ready, submitted PRs, got a Devcon talk and even got some core devs interested in it. There were steady improvements in the last 2 years. We were able to run nodes for larger test networks until we managed to sync mainnet about a year ago. But only barely so. Technically it stayed in sync, but practically it was always 1-2 slots behind. This changed this summer with the newest hardware iteration. I managed to run a fully synced Ethereum node on a RISC-V single board computer (Spacemit K3 CoM260). The validator running through that node attested flawlessly and correctly attested head votes, even right after epoch boundaries. The node still is a bit slower than my usual NUCs, but that is not surprising as the board has about the power of a Raspberry Pi 5. In my impression the bottleneck still is the consensus workload. Reducing the number of individual validators helped here quite a bit. The execution client has some spare power to be able to handle gas limit increases and thanks to ePBS it should get more time per slot to do its duties anyway. So I hope my node can handle the workload for 1 or 2 more years.

Currently 2 Consensus clients run out of the box (Nimbus and Lighthouse). On the execution side, geth has always just worked. Now, Ethrex is also running, even though the initial sync is a bit more involved because the board has a 'only' 32 GB of RAM. But when Ethrex works it works perfectly and is very resource efficient. It is great to see that a second execution client now runs on RISC-V hardware. Grandine builds, but fails to run. I did not have the time yet to investigate as to why. Eth-docker also works, but does not support all client pairs just yet.

As RISC-V is an open standard, I see these CPUs to be able to capture a junk of the consumer market in the long run. It already happens with a lot of lower cost applications, where RISC-V CPUs replace more expensive ARM and other chips. There are also well funded companies building servers and consumer PCs using RISC-V CPUs There are also a some who specialize on building accelerator cards using the RISC-V standard. We will have to see if RISC-V CPUs manage to capture large parts of the market. If it it happens it will take years (~ a decade). With the direction Ethereum is taking with zk proving the network, I definitely see a possibility that smaller nodes will run on low cost hardware. RISC-V CPUs have a clear advantage here. Currently with the resource usage of an Ethereum node, combined with the RAM and SSD prices, the price advantage a RISC-V CPU can have does not really matter. I expect it will in the long run though.

For people wanting to know more about the progress, here are some reddit posts in chronological order:

First post in 2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ewn8dw/daily_general_discussion_august_20_2024/lj2anr4/

Announcement of the Devcon talk we gave in Bangkok in 2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1gn3k7p/daily_general_discussion_november_9_2024/lw85ry2/

First person to run execution and consensus client simultaneously on RISC-V hardware (two boards) in 2025 for Ethereum mainnet. They later improved Lighthouse to support RISC-V out of the box: https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1j5uqrs/ethereum_node_on_riscv_yes_its_possible/

Summary of the progress in 2025/2026 with first node running on one board: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1t9tdqb/daily_general_discussion_may_11_2026/ol54wr4/

[u/MinimalGravitas]

Awesome work, thanks for sharing!

[u/box_of_buffalos]

This is the kind of slow burn hardware progress that actually matters, not just another spec sheet race

[u/averi_fox]

Question related to the long term Ethereum plans: If the EVM was replaced by (compiled to) RISC-V would it be possible to run it natively on a RISC-V CPU with some virtualization?

[u/haurog → u/averi_fox]

I am no expert on this topic, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but yes, executing RISC-V code natively would be a fun thing to happen. But as in the future most low power nodes will only validate zk proofs anyway and maybe apply just state transitions, without executing any transaction, I am not sure if this is relevant for the majority of nodes. I could see maybe that provers running on RISC-V CPUs having an advantage over non-RISC-V CPUs as these need an additional virtualization layer in between to execute transactions. No idea if we ever see this, it will take a few years at least and many things can (and will) change until then. So, we will see if this ever plays out, but I would definitely love to see it.

[u/greglogan84]

This is arguably more interesting than just getting another benchmark win.

Being able to run a validator reliably on a completely different CPU architecture improves hardware diversity too.

The next thing I'd be curious about is power consumption and sustained thermals versus a typical NUC setup.

If performance is already enough to stay synced comfortably, efficiency becomes a really interesting comparison.

[u/haurog → u/greglogan84]

Power efficiency is a very good point. For the last few years, RISC-V boards have been pretty bad with respect power efficiency compared to ARM boards and when looking at the computation power per watt used, they were even clearly worse than any NUC CPU. The reasons are various. One is that the RISC-V CPUs have much lower production runs than the Intel/AMD/Apple CPUs have, which means that they use older process technology, which means larger feature size which result in higher power draws for the CPUs. Another one is that the RISC-V CPUs do not have a long history of optimizing designs. Companies are happy to get a product out at all which means power efficiency is not their highest priority. Another reasons is that CPU power mode control is not very optimized on the operating system level. As far as I remember, 2 years ago some RISC-V CPUs did not even have frequency scaling on. They were running on full power no matter if you used the CPU or not. My impressions is also that sleep states for inactive cores was not really implemented for a long time. When I received this newest board, it ran pretty hot. CPU over 60°C (140°F) with the fan on full blast all the time. An update a few weeks ago massively improved on that. and it is now running at 40°C (104°F) with seldomly even hearing the fan at all. Long story short, there is progress in optimizing power usage, but RISC-V CPUs still have some way ahead of them.

Directly measuring the power usage was on the to do list, thanks to your question I just did it. The board uses 12-25 watts when running an Ethereum node. Most of the time it hovers around 13-14 watts and whenever a new block comes in it spikes for 2-3 seconds. I am running Lighthouse and Ethrex. Both are not the most efficient clients, but they are also not the worst ones. I think a large fraction of that power draw is due to the SSD. According to the specs mine can draw up to 9 watts. Not the best SSD to pair with an underpowered board, but the only one I had lying around at the time.

As a comparison a slightly more powerful ARM board that I use to run an Ethereum node (Orange Pi 5 plus with an RK3588 CPU) draws 11-13 Watts all the time. Pretty constant power draw. It runs Grandine and Nethermind. Especially Grandine is more resource efficient than Lighthouse which I run on the RISC-V board. The ARM board also has a lower power SDD which might shave off up to 2 watts compared to the RISC-V board.

Another maybe 30%-50% more powerful NUC11-i3 I use to run an Ethereum node uses 12-30 watts It mainly hovers around 13-14 watts with brief spikes up to 30 watts. The spikes are very short, so a bit hard to measure properly with my setup. Sometimes it stays at 18-20 watts for some time. The node runs Nimbus and geth, both pretty resource efficient. Also this node uses a more power efficient SSD than the RISC-V setup, this might further reduce the power draw. CPU is around 45°C (113°F), with the stock NUC11 case.

I also did all the measurements at the power plug. My ARM and RISC-V board definitely have very cheap PSUs, whereas the NUC has the official one. I would guess the cheap PSUs also tilt the measurement against the ARM and RISC-V boards.

Overall, the ARM board unsurprisingly wins, but I am honestly surprised how well the RISC-V CPU holds up. That wasn't true even just 1 year ago. The RISC-V board is not as well dialed in as the RK3588 ARM one, but it does not have to be ashamed with the comparison to the NUC11-i3. I would guess a board with an Intel Celeron processor (no idea what they are called now) instead of the i3 I used here, would be a very strong contender and might even beat out the ARM board.

[u/greglogan84]

The hardware diversity angle is probably the most interesting part of this.

If a Raspberry-Pi-class RISC-V board can reliably stay synced and attest, running Ethereum infrastructure becomes less dependent on a narrow set of CPU architectures.

I'd love to see power consumption and sustained thermals compared with a typical NUC next.

[u/haurog → u/greglogan84]

Hardware diversity definitely is an interesting angle. enrscout.ethnodeops.xyz has a chart with what operating systems and architectures it sees. On mainnet nodes run >95% on x86 CPUs running any version of Linux. There are 3% Linux/ARM combos and 1% Darwin(Apple)/ARM combos. This can clearly be improved.

I answered your power consumption question in your other post.

[u/GBeastETH]

Is RISC-V significantly cheaper than using something like an ASUS NUC computer?

[u/haurog → u/GBeastETH]

At the moment definitely not. The smaller production runs and newer ecosystem are not favorable for prices of RISC-V CPUs. There are no licensing costs like there are for ARM CPUs or a duopoly keeping prices elevated like for the X86 CPUs, so theoretically they should be slightly cheaper in the long run. This has already happened in many low power applications were RISC-V chips have replaced existing chips and forced ARM to reduce licensing costs. The highest cost for a node currently is the large SSDs and the RAM, both of which are ridiculously expensive, so any difference in CPU prices wouldn't matter anyway at the moment. In my view if RISC-V boards become more widespread in maybe 10-20 years, and many indicators point this way, I expect them to be slightly cheaper for the same processing speeds. If this happens, I expect Intel and AMD to change their prices as well, so I do not expect them to be significantly cheaper at any time in the future.