This is the first revision of a developer board. It is intended for die-hard open source fanatics with money and (this is the real audience) professional developers who want to port operating systems (and perhaps their software) to RISC-V. Such developer boards are always expensive. Cheaper board will become available as soon as this audience is saturated. Then a next (cheaper) revision will be put to market that targets user mode software developers. This revision will still be expensive, but already cheaper. The following revision will target adventurous tinkerers. etc.
And so it trickles down and slowly the price decreases over time. But if you want to take a bet: it will nevertheless stay much more expensive than a Raspberry Pi for a long time.
They're for someone like Western Digital to buy for their devs to develop and test stuff against in their own designs.
In short the production run is very small and that's why it's so expensive. ARM SBCs with custom SoCs cost around the same. Just take a look at linaro's ARM desktop [0] It's $1200 and doesn't even come with 8GB of RAM.
Such a shame it has A53 cores instead of beefier A72 or newer… I guess Socionext was specifically going for super low power
I think that's pretty exciting.
As for super low cost hardware development: you can add a RISC-V CPU to FPGAs with as little as, say, 1500 LUTs, which can be purchased for less than $10.
I don't understand you mean by "proper open ISA".
The point of an open ISA is not "every product made with it is super cheap" (licensing is a tiny aspect of it), and expecting a newly developed, small-volume product to compete with something made by an established player at multiple orders of magnitude larger scale is totally unrealistic.
There's smaller, cheaper RISC-V products out there if you want something risc-v to play with. Serious adoption is going to happen at different places and not bound to "what does an HiFive dev kit cost", that's a rounding error in many places.
RPi also kind of ruined the hardware world because AFAIK the SoC was being dumped below cost; I'm not sure if that's still true.
If the purpose was to kill off the grossly overpriced PC104 market, mission accomplished. The fact that those boards have spawned a zillion competitors seems to suggest that any further dumping is not having the desired effect.
A free ISA is about more than saving a few pennies on each board in royalties, it's about having a chip you can truly trust. One that doesn't have some opaque binary blob running at ring -2. One where nothing is encrypted by a key only the manufacturer (and whomever they can strike a deal with) has. About hardware you truly own and control.
Actually nobody will have a rude awakening from that as everybody in RISC-V already knows this. That ISA don't matter much for price or performance was mentioned in pretty much every single presentation on RISC-V.
Only by open source fans who don't know much about hardware had such unrealistic expectations.
RISC-V allows for a future of open and costume hardware to be used. There will never be an open hardware RISC-V RPi style board unless you have an open ISA you can build around and use the software base.
Now we have real shot at something like that coming about.
There are lots of things that cost money in hardware design, and ISA licensing is a very small part of them.
Edit: I wonder if I should do a rather confrontational blog post telling people why Open hardware is never going to be the free lunch that open source software is..
Bunnie Huang spoke at one of the RISC-V summits on this topic.
Indeed - and this is exactly the point of ISA licensing (and IP blocks): to make it sufficiently cheaper to just license the ISA or IP blocks instead of developing the product from ground up.
Unless we can automate the chip making process. Think of it as the chip version of PCB micromanufacture or 3D printing. At some point someone will make a business out of making boards and placing all the components for you. The trick is to do it without any retooling and no humans involved.
What is the manufacturing cost of a wafer full of, say, CPUs? If we can all get our designs in there, we can share the manufacturing cost.
[0]: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/181867-amds-project-sk...
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) Alpha is to a large extent the ultimate RISC architecture that on the user side does not have any implicit sideefects of instructions and syscalls and interrupts work by simply exchanging two register sets. The idea is that there is PALcode which is the only privileged code running on the CPU, which then keeps track of whether whatever is currently running in userspace is user or kernel code and passes messages between these, to some extent it is microkernel as part of the CPU, which you additionally can as an OS modify (in reality you could not, because the PALcode is amalgamation of both the OS semantics, quirks of the actual CPU implementation and the actual motherboard in given system)IMhO, RISC-V is slightly better than Alpha on a many fronts: the conditional branches which compares two registers would take two instructions on Alpha (on the critical path), RISC-V code density is better with compressed, the encoding is slightly cheaper for hardware, it ISA is more forward-looking/extensible, oh and it's open of course. The only thing I miss are the POPC/CTZ/CLZ instructions, but the B set will include them for implementations that have it.
UPDATE: more RISC-V upsides
Of course, that never happened. But people keep wishing.
> [0]: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/181867-amds-project-sk...
The mentioned Project Skybridge is dead: https://wccftech.com/amd-cancelled-skybridge-glofo-terminate...
RISC-V may not change everything, but I do believe that it will change on thing in a major way: the financials of CPU IP such as Tensilica, Cortex-M0, ARC etc.
There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal.
Edit: in the maker world, the so-called Blue Pill is incredibly popular. It has an STM32F103 SOC with a 72MHz Cortex M3 and tons of digital and analog interfaces. On AliExpress, these boards go for $1.60 a piece!
Reminds me of USB vs Firewire. Firewire was the superior of the two yet it lost. Why? USB didn't have Fw's $0.25 licensing fee per manufactured device.
The main CPU is just one of many chips in a computer nowadays – even some cables have ARM-chips built into them to convert signals. RISC-V can probably be an even better fit there as its open design makes it a lot easier to customize it so that its tailored for such specific tasks.
The interesting bit here is that from what I've heard, RISC V could be twice as efficient as ARM. Couple that with the open source model and we could see some real shifts in computing very soon.
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sipeed-maix-the-world-fir... [2] https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-MAIX-I-module-WiFi-versio...
As an additional insight: this is an offspring of one of the developers of mining hardware, Canaan. They have released the chip right before their anticipated IPO: https://coingeek.com/crypto-miner-maker-canaan-eyes-going-pu...
https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS3/intro.html
Probably more open, too.
Hopefully some future product(s) with more PC compatible form factors come out in the next few years. :)
RISC-V isn't really about price or performance – it's about innovation, agility, exploration and new frontiers.
