I thought Eben Upton's comments were interesting regarding using RISC-V for a Raspberry Pi board. Basically x86 still has much better software support than ARM,

I thought Eben Upton's comments were interesting regarding using RISC-V for a Raspberry Pi board. Basically x86 still has much better software support than ARM, which has much better support than RISC-V; and on the hardware side, there were no readily available RISC-V cores that were competitive (presumably in price/performance/power) with their current ARM cores. So RISC-V wasn't a yet a viable option for mainline Raspberry Pi systems. He also complained about current RISC-V hardware implementations having too many feature variations (and this vs. ARM, which is worse than x86 already.) However, he thought that RISC-V would work fine today for microcontrollers where 1) you're running a small/thin software stack and 2) raw performance isn't that important (which as pointed out below seems to be saying that current RISC-V implementations should be able to match the lower computations-per-second of microcontrollers like RP2040/Rpi Pico without exceeding the power/heat/space/cost requirements for that chip/board.) (My own take is that cheap x86/celeron mini-PCs are becoming more competitive with boards like Rpi for use cases where you don't need the credit card form factor or GPIO, and x86 software support is compelling. And I agree that it will take a while for RISC-V to get good hardware and software support, though it seems to be improving every year.)