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Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

Now if the HiFive could be scaled uo to match the performance of a current x86 CPU, this might become a serious contender for a decent set of applications.

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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 needs to have a better performance per dollar, however, or its not a great option.

> 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.

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'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 a small run developer kit. It's not designed for your use case.

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.

If nothing else, it can at least be part of your hard drive: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13678/western-digital-reveals...

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.

I think it's coming sooner rather than later. Obviously arm has the upper hand here but windows is still exclusive to qualcomm.

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.

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