Comment by yjftsjthsd-h
7 years ago
It doesn't need to hit the same perf as high-end x86 to be useful for a lot of uses; observe the sheer number of IoT projects run on Raspberry Pi and the like. Now, of course, I think we all would like to see high-end riscv be a thing so we can ditch x86 in that market segment too.
It's a $1000 for that HiFive board. That's a crazy amount of money for a hobby board, I could swing it if it was like $500 to 600, but that's not the case. I could build a really nice conventional desktop for a $1000 dollars.
It's not a hobby board and it's not a product. The SoC is "engineering sample", made in runs of 100 and probably costing about $300 to $400 for each one sold assuming most of them work. That's before you count the board, which also has non-cheap components. The cost of 8 GB of DDR4 2400 is all by itself several times what a Pi (with 1 GB of 900 MHz LPDDR2) retails for.
None of this matters if you're a company that wants to get into RISC-V and you're paying an engineer $10k+ a month to evaluate RISC-V and get a head start on developing your OS or application for it. The hardware cost (including expansion board) is maybe a week's salary.
It's a small run developer kit. It's not designed for your use case.
It needs to have a better performance per dollar, however, or its not a great option.
It's an early-access prototype for engineers to use to develop software for the cheap products that will come in the next year or two. It's not intended for hobbyists.
I'm not referring to this specific hardware - I know this is not consumer-ready - but to RISC-V overall. If we want to sell a RISC-V-based x86/ARM replacement, it can't cost more than the well-known, multi-sourced part for the same application.
As an engineer, I care about the elegance of the underlying hardware/ISA, but when it's time to buy tech for a client, I can't afford to do that.
> It needs to have a better performance per dollar
I am not sure whether this will ever come.
It came, went, and came again for ARM. On complete mainstream systems, however, the price of the CPU will be a relatively small fraction of the total BOM.