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Sorry, my comment was not about if RISC-V were in SBCs but about software and documentation support for SBCs outside of Raspberry Pi being very very poor. My
by bobajeff 1y ago
Sorry, my comment was not about if RISC-V were in SBCs but about software and documentation support for SBCs outside of Raspberry Pi being very very poor.
My hope is that the situation for RISC-V SBCs would be an improvement over ARM SBCs given that chipmakers wouldn't be able to rely on the smartphone market for customers.
- adolph 1y agoYeah, Raspberry Pi has done a great job with documentation and SDKs for SBC and their line of MCU. I don't think Raspberry Pi would have been started outside the margins of the smartphone market economies of scale. Sure RPi are pretty big now but the smartphone market created a world where low power CPUs and a lot of other components are available at all. My recollection is that as RPi got further away from standard chips, they struggled balancing retail availability while servicing their commercial contracts. RISC-V, to me, seems more of an IP hedge for chipmakers who may find themselves constrained in designs or distribution in the future because the IP is controlled by potentially unfriendly companies or jurisdictions. Sure, there are some licensing fees/certifications that are friction, but the goal is independence even at the cost of redundant effort in chip and compiler design.
- bobajeff 1y agoWell I don't know what the market for these companies putting out RISC-V processors and SBCs are going for but I'm hoping they will take support at least as seriously as Raspberry Pi. Maybe none of them will but I'd hope that given that they can't get those economies of scale that they'd make the most of the hobbyist SBC market.