Comment by Something1234
7 years ago
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.