RISC-V

This is a kind of CPU that operates similar to an ARM processor and it is open source. I have been following the development of new RISC-V hardware on the market and purchased a few SBCs from Pine64 to experiment with.

The RISC-V SBCs in 2023 have not been able to perform as well as ARM in any benchmarks but this is still very early and the software has not yet been optimized for this kind of CPU architecture. I am hopeful that there will be improved performance numbers at the high end later but they are performing well in the micro controller market now.

The micro controller below is an Ox64 and it is essentially a RP2040 with better performance and more features. These are only $6-8 and the prices should always stay low because they are open source. There are also opportunities to design more application specific CPUs than what is available from ARM. I am hopeful for the future of RISC-V but for now I would only recommend using the micro controllers.