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Comment by byset | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the group behind this is Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, which is sponsored by UC Berkeley as well as a major Chinese university and the Shenzhen government.

China is quite interested in RISC-V gaining traction as trade and security barriers rise and they work to build up their domestic technology sector.

Going into wild-ass speculation mode, if this board really is affordable, I wonder if it's being subsidized by the Chinese gov't to encourage RISC-V adoption.

If I understand correctly, it's hard to make a cheap RISC-V Linux board with a price in the same order of magnitude as Raspberry Pi, because the Pi benefits from the availability of cheap, powerful ARM-based CPUs that were mass-produced for the mobile phone market. Linux-capable RISC-V parts have nowhere near these economies of scale.

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Do we know the foundry?

I like your idea because I could see the Chinese government doing this to help prop up SMIC too. The RPi4 isn't any smaller than 16nm, and SMIC needs 14nm customers.

Shoot for the 500MHz target listed, which is achievable with Victorian era style over engineering. Next sell those more or less at cost after the government footed the bill for initial capital (probably paying back .gov.cn first). Then using the massive body of software you expect from the new ecosystem around the first wave of chips to reoptimize the cores and inch your way towards really competitive chips. All the while SMIC gets great experience at their lower node with a pretty low risk, but high volume project.

Total speculation, but fun speculation. If someone pulls that off they probably win the whole Made in China 2025 thing for homegrown computers in an interesting enough niche to have a foreign audience too.

Image in the article says TSMC 28nm.

https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Pico...

Lol, oh well, it was a good idea.

Thanks for the citation!

That the US has gotten TSMC to boycot Huawei is quite recent. The deal for this was probably done before the latest sanctions.

TSMC has massive economies of scale and are just very hard for alternatives to compete with.

Do you have an overview or link how that has come to be by any chance?

I am sorry I don't but the fab industry with its billion-dollar machines that pops out chips at a marginal cost of a dollar a piece should be a textbook example of a natural monopoly.

It's a slide from a presentation given at the RISC-V Global Forum, held online on September 3.

Thank you!

Apparantly we are in for another major escalation of the chip wars:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-smic-exclusive/...

Exclusive: Trump administration weighs blacklisting China's chipmaker SMIC

The message here is clear - US is not a reliable tech vendor.

This is the exact reason why RISC-V is getting increasingly more attentions.

I'm all in SMIC stocks. You can get a sizeable part of the company today for cheap, and if sanctions continue, and issues with Taiwan scalate, China is going to go all-in SMIC as well.

> Going into wild-ass speculation mode, if this board really is affordable, I wonder if it's being subsidized by the Chinese gov't to encourage RISC-V adoption.

You might find this[1] meeting with Steven Zhao interesting. Steven Zhao is the guy behind Orange Pi, raspberry pi alternative. Interesting part translated:

Steven announces that Orange Pi can buy a good quality WiFi component for $1, that his cards will have a good WiFi connection for that price.

- Uh, if the purchase of the component is $1, inevitably the exit price will be a little higher for the end customer, Mr. Zhao? - If you tell me the price, I will know your margin ... -

- No, because today all Orange Pi cards are sold at the BOM (Bills Of Material) price.

- Does that mean that the cost of engineers, premises, development hardware, design and all that ... isn't impacted in the price of a card?

- That's right.

- But how is that possible?

- We benefit from government grants.

And here's a statement that takes your breath away. Orange Pi is a private company in a state dumping system. This can be said from a Western point of view, of the international agreements and of all the conceptual set-up intended to protect the big established industrialists.

1: https://www.minimachines.net/a-la-une/orange-pi-steven-zhao-...

Interesting, though selling at cost isn't particularly egregious. With enough volume and competition, any product's price would approach that.

Also the pricing of low end Pi models is probably very close to BOM cost too.

Having competition to x86 and ARM would be great.

China could create the economies of scale needed to drive prices down. I saw something where NVIDIA was using RISC-V in part of its GPU’s.

Yep, the sanctions have also turned a lot of Chinese R&D money into open source development funds, I love it.

I thought that the CPU in the original Raspberry Pi was designed for set top boxes not mobile phones.

I also recall that it was actually primarily a GPU chip which had an ARM core originally intended as a driver for the GPU (and not really intended as a primary processor). And they were leftovers from larger volume chip runs.

The BCM2835 was originally a high volume shipping cell phone GPU for Nokia with a different part number (BCM2708) and the ARM core enabled internally. It was also stacked with DDR memory.

It shipped first in a STB for Roku, but that was happenstance vs any design intention.

The market for separate cell phone GPUs died off, but the die was manufactured still for the RPi.

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