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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

Kind of weird to perform extensive benchmarks against an outdated version. The Pi Zero 2 is a lot faster!

It is, though these 2 boards are the closest in terms of specifications "on paper" as they both offer a single 1GHz core, 512MB of RAM (unless you go for the 1GB MQ Pro) etc. Comparing it to the RPi Zero 2 felt a bit pointless in a standalone head-to-head piece. There'll be a separate post in a few weeks comparing all of the "zero" style boards from the various vendors that may give you what you're looking for!

The actual metric most customers will care about is price. Pick a Pi variant at the same price as the RISC-V board, how does the performance compare?

On the one hand I would say that RISC-V SBCs are not yet for anyone who cares only about price. RISC-V cores and SoCs with Linux SBC capability are in an early stage. RISC-V has already taken over a lot of the microcontroller world, based on price and freedom.

On the other hand, I would say that the price of a number of these D1-based RISC-V boards are now within the range of a Pi Zero plus lunch at McDonalds, so if you only want one of them the price difference is basically irrelevant.

A year ago a Pi 3 equivalent RISC-V board (the HiFive Unmatched) cost $665, which was a big drop from 2008's HiFive Unleashed plus MicroSemi expansion board for $2998 total. Since December there's been the VisionFive for about $180 (although with only 2 cores not 4). In a few months there will be the newly-announced Pine64 Star64 with an expected price of $60 with 4 GB RAM or $80 with 8 GB RAM (they've said "about the same price and performance as the Quartz64")

That's pretty rapid price drops.

RISC-V SBCs with considerably better performance than a Pi 4 (similar to the RK3588 boards that just came out a couple of months ago) will be demonstrated working in the next couple of months and probably shipping early next year. They will, again, probably be quite expensive at first, but existing is the hard part. Price is then just a matter of mass production economics.

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