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Comment by Narishma | Hacker News Reader

Anybody knows why it is so expensive? Is it just the low quantities?

I was talking to the SiFive team yesterday and it's down to the relatively small run of wafers they made. The price will come down, likely very dramatically, but not for a while.

This board is very much to get hardware into the hands of developers who are porting software (such as me), it's not really something for end users at this time.

What are you porting?

We are working on Fedora RISC-V.

That, and customers for this kind of board are typically expected to be working on a project with a significant budget where management wouldn't even bat an eye at dropping $1000 on a development tool.

Maybe the pricing is to keep out people who would only buy low volumes of chips later?

Sony used to price Playstation 2 dev kits at $thousands. I always figured that pricing was to ensure only rich companies with e.g. marketing budgets were going to develop games.

Frankly they are probably losing money at a $1k price point, with the millions they have probably spent in 28nm production runs. They're making a long play here.

It's a bit bizarre that people are expecting RaspPi prices this.

Rpi has really mutated what people expect out of EVKs.

What started as an "educational" board has pretty much turned into a turnkey cheap Linux board for a lot of people. So they expect that out of every board now.

I also wish Broadcom hadn't dumped these things under market price. That's another thing that has really messed up expectations.

Keep in mind that console dev kits of past were devices produced almost manually in very limited numbers. They also actually included a lot of hardware required for debugging only and was built to endure almost 24/7 work without overheating.

So there are reasons why this hardware was expensive. And there absolutely no reason for console vendors to sell them at loss simply because otherwise companies will buy more devices than absolutely needed to get job done.

As for the limiting access to console Sony and others managed it fine without making devkits pricey.

> Keep in mind that console dev kits of past were devices produced almost manually in very limited numbers

You might be thinking of the alpha dev kits. Those were basically gigantic metal wirewraps, and if you were at a large game dev you might get one or two locked away in a conference room. I can't remember off hand if those cost anything actually? You had to be a substantial game studio to get one in the first place, and Sony took them back.

Either way, that's not what I was thinking of. The production PS2 dev kits (called "TOOL") cost $thousands and were not manually constructed. A game team would have a lot of these. I can't imagine these cost as much to build as they charged, especially years after the PS2 launched.[1]

[1] - I wish I could remember/find the price for the TOOL, I want to say it was like $10 or $20K, even 2-3 years after PS2 launched?

It seems a little expensive but not unusually so. A beagle board is 270. This has double the processor count, and is 64bit vs beagle board's 32 bit. It has 4x the ram of a beagle board as well.

It looks like it uses an ASIC, which in low quantities are fairly expensive.

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