Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiqiren | Hacker News Reader

He's saying that shipping from the big western parts suppliers (Digikey, Mouser, Segger) costs a lot of money. When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free. It is very likely a good chunk of the overhead from western part suppliers has to do with export controls and risk aversion.

Aliexpress doesn't do any ID verification hassle. This is all an argument more about distribution and shipping. RISK-V is going to win because getting the parts is insanely cheap and without overhead.

The "fix" is probably Digikey, Mouser, and Segger need to just let buyers check a box where they assume all liability and parts are just thrown in the mail and forgot about - something aliexpress is great at doing.

View on HN

Is the only source for ARM chips the big Western parts suppliers? If not, and you can get them from AliExpress or Crowd Supply, then, again, there's no difference in shipping between ARM and RISC-V chips.

A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results, so I don't think your argument refutes anything I said.

> A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results

Most of those are going to either be fake, or a clone with all kinds of weird compatibility issues. You might even get recycled chips, scavenged from e-waste.

You can buy STM32s from LCSC (Chinese equivalent of Digikey). They're probably not fake - LCSC is a fairly established trusted manufacturer.

China makes a huge majority of the world's electronics, and a big chunk of those will have ARM microcontrollers on them. Of course Chinese suppliers can get genuine ARM chips.

> When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free.

China has amazing prices for genuine electronics components from every manufacturer. Including stm32, NXP as well as local arm32 licensees gd32,hk32,XHSC. From which you can buy Cortex-M0+ down to 10-20cents per piece.

Literally anything you can buy in the West, you get for fraction of the price in China, even in small volumes.

If you live in the third world you wouldn't even think about ordering from "western parts supplier", everything is expensive and overpriced and selection is shit (compared to China).

It's not just Western shipping parts. You can buy cheap Indian parts, and have the very, same insane shipping costs as with "Western" parts. Ie a 2€ part from India will still cost 25€, whilst the 2€ part from China will cost 2-4€

Why is that? Is it simply a matter of scale (not enough shipping containers leaving from India to Trinidad and Tobago)?

In case of the China -> Europe and US routes it's certainly that the air fright traffic is heavily optimized and subsidized by China.

From India obviously not, so you have to pay normal shipping costs.

So primarily state intervention then?

Aliexpress doesn't just sell RISC-V parts... I've purchased dozens of STM32, GD32, nrf52 parts from Aliexpress and LCSC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com