Nice rant, but completely beside the point. This is a manufacturer’s evaluation board, simply being resold by Sipeed, RVboards, and others. As such it is an ex

Nice rant, but completely beside the point. This is a manufacturer’s evaluation board, simply being resold by Sipeed, RVboards, and others. As such it is an expensive full-featured board. The comparable in purpose ARM Juno board for the A72 and A53 and Mali is $10,000. (They probably have a newer one now, I haven't checked) Sipeed and Pine64 and others will build much cheaper boards of their own ($10 to $12, competing against Pi Zero with a better product) using the same D1 SoC later in the year when production has ramped up and hopefully the general chip shortage has eased. The most interesting thing about this SoC and board is it is the first RISC-V Vector processing hardware to ship, by probably at least 12 months if not 18. It implements the 0.7.1 draft of the spec, which is incompatible in a number of ways with the 1.0 spec that will be ratified this summer, but some code is binary compatible (e.g. a memcpy()) and it’s good for gaining experience with something at least similar to the final spec. I have test results showing considerable speedup: http://hoult.org/d1_memcpy.txt http://hoult.org/d1_memcpy.txt http://hoult.org/d1_strcpy.txt http://hoult.org/d1_strcpy.txt ARM is also some way from having their similar SVE in consumer SoCs/boards. Also the BeagleV "StarLight" will be out in September at $119 for a board with 4 dual issue U74 cores (comparable to the ARM A55 minus NEON) running at 1.5 GHz with 4 GB RAM. That will still be slower than a Pi 4 but significantly faster than a Pi 3. At a higher price, certainly. But it's huge progress. I have a beta BeagleV and it's good, though significantly inferior to the mass production board. Don't forget the Pi 4 didn't exist two years ago, and RISC-V didn't exist as a buyable product until the Arduino-compatible HiFive1 in December 2016. There will be RISC-V boards performance comparable to the Pi 4 in 2022 (using Alibaba C910 or SiFive U84 cores). Will there be a Pi 5 in 2022? Maybe, but I'd bet against it. Their cadence isn't that fast. Who knows -- the Pi 5 might yet be RISC-V.