Comment by wolfgke
7 years ago
> But looking at the $35 raspberry pi with a license-bound ARM ISA and a supposedly open source board for $1000 it looks like HiFive is playing by intel's or ARM's rules. No chance for risc-v adoption with this ridiculous overpricing
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.
Indeed. This is a "developer board". They're made with little consequence to cost and they usually cost ghastly amounts compared to what you'd expect out of a standard motherboard.
They're for someone like Western Digital to buy for their devs to develop and test stuff against in their own designs.