Yeah the near-term and long-term RISC-V products haven't materialised yet. Software hasn't matured all that much either. I was looking at the iMx8 but like you

Yeah the near-term and long-term RISC-V products haven't materialised yet. Software hasn't matured all that much either. I was looking at the iMx8 but like you said, anything with automotive or embedded applications in mass produced systems is hard to get. I've seem them used in security devices that do a bit of on-device pre-authentication and even there I'm hearing about supply issues. It was mostly Apalis COM based but they had the benefit of switching between a Tegra and iMx version whenever supply was getting constrained. (or essentially the prices started getting bumped before the next order cycle) I think the lead times for some models became over 36 months at some point (either the imx8 ones or the Tegra ones)... yikes. Regarding the GPU and DMA blocks: that seems to be the standard at this stage. I guess it's because it's mostly licensed IP and because they need to honour the NDA from their upstream vendor, we're just getting the blobs as a side-effect. Same with the Zinq and some of the Sitara GPU cores they got from PowerVR. Luckily, that last one has gotten a lot of FOSS attention and besides loading some startup firmware or microcode it's largely free. The whole 'freedom' thing doesn't have to be an ultimate goal here, but it does have the nice side-effect that it opens up the use of mainline source trees, broadly used and well-maintained tools and toolchains etc. instead of just some giant tarball the vendor prepared for a specific kernel and boot loader combination. And if the vendor decides to focus on the next new shiny thing, you can just port/upstream sources as needed to keep your project going, vendor be damned.