The pretty minimal RV32EC core Ibex is estimated 15k gates: https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex But, the similarly minimal Arm Cort

The pretty minimal RV32EC core Ibex is estimated 15k gates: https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex But, the similarly minimal Arm Cortex M0 is, drumroll, 12k gates. Not saying this means Arm is better than RISC-V, such a small difference can probably be explained by some microarchitectural feature or lack of it. Just that you can scale down Arm as well. But yes, I can see tiny chips like these putting a squeeze on 8 and 16 bit microcontrollers.