SiFive released the Linux capable RISC-V dev kits years ago and for long time now there has been many options besides what SiFive offers. Only few however are “cheap”.

Maybe not mad, but certainly not very good at searching.

CORRECTION: 2010 was the _founding_ of the RISC-V project. I don't have the date of the 1.0 release, but nobody would ship hardware based on a 1.0. Release 2.2 (user)/1.11 (priv) wasn't released until 2018! Light of this, hardware is actually coming out pretty quickly.

Hardware is expensive and takes a long time. In comparison, Arm was founded in 1990. When was the first Linux-capable Arm-based dev board available for purchase?

I'm probably as unhappy with the delays as anyone, but the momentum has not slowed and better options _will_ become available for sale.

Advanced RISC Machines Ltd was founded in 1991, but one of their parent companies (Acorn) had already shipped over 100,000 ARM-based desktop computers at that point.

The RISC-V ISA design was started in 2010. The ARM ISA design was started in 1983.

> Arm was founded in 1990. When was the first Linux-capable Arm-based dev board available for purchase?

I think the first Linux-capable ARM-based dev board was available for purchase in 01989: the Acorn/BBC A3000 had an ARM2; the outdated https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/machines/riscpc/ says, "The support for these machines is now beginning to become increasingly difficult, however there is still support for them in the Linux kernel."

This is misleading in two ways:

1. Linux didn't yet run on it, since it hadn't been written yet; the effort to port Linux to ARM started in 01994: https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/docs/history.php

2. Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd., was spun out of Acorn in 01990, but the Acorn RISC Machine project started in 01983 and the ARM1 was first fabbed successfully in 01985. So the A3000 was shipped six years after the design effort began and four years after the first working ARM hardware.

https://riscv.org/exchanges/boards/ claims, "Nezha is a AIoT development board customized by AWOL based on Allwinner’s D1 chip. It is the world’s first mass-produced development board that supports 64bit RISC-V instruction set and Linux system." I find this hard to believe because the D1 just came out a year or two ago and I think the SiFive "HiFive Unleashed" shipped in 02018, and the "SiFive Freedom U540" was announced in 02017 https://linuxgizmos.com/sifive-launches-first-risc-v-sbc-tha... after SiFive launched in 02016 https://www.wsj.com/articles/backers-of-open-source-chips-la.... Seems like they had Linux-capable chips sampling later in 02016: http://web.archive.org/web/20160915000420/http://hackerboard...

Your use of zero before the actual year, as though you’re a COBOL-addled Long Now fanatic, makes me want to think the value is in octal. C brain damage on my part, no doubt.

Me too, me too. If only I could blame my brain damage on COBOL...

Remember that 8 and 9 haven't been valid as octal digits since the ANSI standard.

D1 is indeed the first mass-produced Linux-capable RISC-V SoC.

SiFive made something like 500 HiFive Unleashed boards and probably 2000-3000 HiFive Unmatched. They all used effectively prototype chips, made on MPW / Shuttle run.

When the D1 came out I heard the initial production batch was 2 million chips. As with the SoCs that go into Raspberry Pis, the SBCs are a side-line.

Thank you for explaining! I understand much better now.