Interesting. Considering RISC-V is open source, I would expect the board design to cost less. Perhaps they aren't at scale like RP. When I design a device, I typically look at cost first. I find myself using ESP32 a lot because it's super economical and uses very little energy. It's amazing at the price point.
Chips are expensive and socs even moreso. They don't yet have the manufacturing volume to significantly lower unit costs.
You need to understand that the original rpi was built with chips which are old of life of multiple large production runs and they had hundreds of thousands in storage.
This opened the door for cheap SBC, soc, based builds.
Yea, just goes to show that CPU specs are so high that 3 or 4th generation chips are perfectly fine. Even low powered 16 bit chips are more than I need for many applications. Write code with a real compiler without the bloat of a crappy OS (sorry Bill), it turns out you can get by with very modest hardware.
For what it's worth, it looks like they may be moving to risk-v instruction sets down the road. Imoho, makes sense, allowing them to focus on hardware and frameworks and less on compilers.
It's being pushed towards those who have need of their own CPU design. It's not intended for general consumption, that's what the Pi family is for.
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