Hobbyists have a few very cheap RISC-V things they can buy. Check out boards with the Espressif ESP32-C3 or Bouffalo Lab BL602, for example. These are both user

Hobbyists have a few very cheap RISC-V things they can buy. Check out boards with the Espressif ESP32-C3 or Bouffalo Lab BL602, for example. These are both user-programmable WIFI/BT chips running at 200 MHz or so and with a couple of hundred KB of RAM. They sell for a couple of dollars. There are also 1 GHz 512 MB Linux boards similar to Raspberry Pi Zero selling for $15 to $30, depending on features. According to RISC-V International back in June, 10 billion chips have shipped with RISC-V cores in them. Several individual companies have stood up and said they (or their clients) have shipped in the billions each. It often takes 4 to 5 years from a decision to make a CPU core, to having a design that works in simulation (and on FPGA), to having a working test chip, to fixing any minor bugs and moving into mass production, to having the chip integrated into someone's product/board, and manufactured and delivered to customers or shops. Especially as you move up the performance and complexity scale. This is not just for RISC-V but for anything. The first ever RISC-V core, in a chip, on a board went on sale in December 2016, less than six years ago. That was the Arduino-style HiFive1 with a 320 MHz 32 bit E31 core (Berkeley Rocket, basically). It performed competitively with ARM Cortex-M3 devices at the same MHz -- except those topped out at 180 MHz. About 15 months later (about 4 1/2 years ago) the 1.5 GHz single-issue quad core 64 bit 8 GB RAM Linux-running HiFive Unleashed went on sale. Benchmarks (e.g. https://hoult.org/primes.txt https://hoult.org/primes.txt) put it within about 10% of a DUAL issue ARM Cortex-A53 (in e.g. Raspberry Pi 3) on a clock for clock basis -- except, again, it could run at higher MHz. Companies that made a decision to create high performance (e.g. wide OoO) RISC-V cores in early 2018 when the HiFive Unleashed came out would likely be JUST NOW getting close to releasing a product for end users. Except most such companies would have made the decision several years later than that. Rivos, for example, was founded by ex-Apple A-series and M1 ex-PA Semi people in May 2021, three years after the HiFive Unleashed came out, and about the same time as the Unleashed's successor, the dual-issue HiFive Unmatched came out. This month, the first mass-produced low cost quad core RISC-V board, the VisionFive 2, is starting to ship to early customers at near Raspberry Pi prices. It is a quad core dual-issue 1.5 GHz 64 bit Linux-running board with on-chip Imagination Tech GPU, on-board M.2 slot for SSD (or SD or eMMC if you prefer). Standard retail price is $55, $65, or $85 depending on whether you want 2, 4, or 8 GB RAM. Early-bird pricing was about 20% less. Performance is about the same as an ARM A-55 running at the same clock speed, or about 80% as fast as the older OoO A72 cores in the Raspberry Pi 4. However the GPU is up to 4x faster than the GPU in the Pi 4, so the desktop experience should actually be better, at least once the software matures. In September Intel demonstrated a board with their RISC-V "Horse Creek" chip running at 2.2 GHz. It offers performance in the same ballpark with the ARM Cortex-A76 based RK3588 boards that started selling for $150 to $250 back in April or May. SiFive has said that their (not yet named) successor to the HiFive Unmatched will be using this chip. I would not be surprised if SiFive says more about that tomorrow in their presentation at the Linley Fall Processor Conference. In any case it will be just a few months away. RISC-V chips with performance similar to the Apple M1 (and Intel 10th gen and AMD Zen 2) are in the pipeline.