It depends on what you're looking for. RISC-V is a different beast than standard ARM core stuff, so it's being pushed towards a different audience.
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.
What are the respective pro/cons of risc and arm achitectures?
The biggest advantage is the RISC-V architecture is open source, you're free to add or remove things (instructions) at your convenience based on what you're trying to accomplish. ARM is closed-source and licensed, while you can buy the technology via a license you get what they give you.
Both are able to be integrated into your own hardware at the silicon level, unlike a CPU you'd buy from Intel or AMD.
The reason the RISC-V stuff costs so much is because it's not expected that Joe Hacker will go out and buy it like a Pi, it's being sold to BigCo who want to develop a processor for their product that doesn't required license fees and can be right on the silicon with other components. The board is a ready-made development system, and it's designed so that you develop your application and then take what you've made and integrate it with your product.
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