Hundreds.
> China is rallying around the architecture with perhaps hundreds of RISC-V SoCs and dozens of cores in the works.
> “We are talking hundreds, if not thousands, of [RISC-V–based SoC] projects under way; it’s crazy … probably at least 40 to 50 companies or academic groups are dabbing in core development — some for internal use, some for open-source, and some commercial”
I've been looking for RISC-V chips that I can buy right now, and from what I can tell, there are only a handful. Two from SiFive (the E310 embedded processor, and U540 supervisor mode/Linux capable processor), one from GreenWaves (the GAP8). Turns out since I last looked (around the beginning of October) it looks like the Kendryte K210 has been released, also available in the Sipeed M1 module (https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/10/22/sipeed-m1-risc-v-com...). Anyhow, that makes 3 vendors shipping hardware implementations.
It's possible there are other special purpose chips not widely available for sale, or not advertised to English speaking customers, but I haven't found much evidence of them.
There certainly are a lot of RISC-V projects under way, which was what I was referring to by "that likely means that there are a number of others where it's fairly far in the pipeline." I think the "hundreds" from the article you quote is about total number of projects, not total number of vendors.
Some of these are just academic projects, some are multiple projects at the same vendor, and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if it was dozens of vendors that have projects at various stages of completion, however. I can imagine we'll be seeing a lot of releases over the next couple of years.
And there are a number of cores you can run on FPGAs, from high-end cores like BOOM that can be run on big expensive Xilinx FPGAs (or on Amazon's cloud FPGAs), to low-end like PicoRV32 that you can run on a $5 Lattice ICE FPGA.
Take any established Chinese IT company, there are chances they are working on RISC-V based SoC or two. Alibaba - CK902, Huami - Huangshan No. 1, not talking about less known at the West vendors.
But it seems there are some considerations among established IT companies about not announcing RISC-V products very loud, especially in English.
> The Western executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, told us, “A lot of the biggest companies doing this are being very discrete indeed: perhaps they cannot afford to upset Arm.” He said they fear being told by Arm, “‘Oh, the core for your new smartphone is two weeks late.’”
https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1334...