The Chimera folks seem to be confused and/or out of date. The optimum way [1] to build thousands of RISC-V packages has been on real hardware, not in emulation

The Chimera folks seem to be confused and/or out of date. The optimum way [1] to build thousands of RISC-V packages has been on real hardware, not in emulation, ever since the VisionFive 2 came out just over two years ago, at approximately 1/7th the price of the HiFive Unmatched they mention (which came out almost 4 years ago in May 2021). Emulation is convenient if you already have a honking x86, and it's not already busy doing other things. e.g. typically your own desktop computer. But that doesn't scale. It takes three to four $100 VisionFive 2s to get the same overall build performance as a $1500 i9-13900 or 14900 or Ryzen 9 7950x running RISC-V code in docker/qemu. You can use resources more efficiently with a single machine with a lot of cores and a lot of RAM, and it's convenient. The Milk-V Pioneer with 64 2.0 GHz OoO RISC-V cores and 128 GB RAM, available since January 2024, fits that bill, but they also dismiss it because it costs $2500 as a preassembled machine (or $1500 just for motherboard with CPU, BYO RAM and storage and case/ps). But you'd spend $5000 or $6000 on x86 to get the same total throughput in emulation of RISC-V. The same update says they just bought an Ampere Altra to support arm64. They don't say what that cost, but I believe it's going to be minimum $4000. [1] if you don't mind a little more setup (which the Chimera people do) then the optimum optimum way is to run the build scripts and random tools themselves in RISC-V code on either real hardware or in emulation, but distcc the actual C/C++ compiles out to a cross-compiler running native on x86 or Apple (or Ampere). That gives a very significant speedup (up to 10x) over emulation or current RISC-V hardware, while retaining the ability to build even the most complex packages without problems.