I don't really understand the author's conclusions about cost and shipping, and how RISC-V is cheaper and more accessible to people outside the US and Europe. He first talks about how getting $1 worth of chips can cost $60-$200 in shipping for him due to his location... but then by the end claims that RISC-V gives him "an architecture that arrives in my country at ten cents a part".
I don't get how both things can be true. The cost to ship something to Trinidad and Tobago has nothing to do with whether it's ARM or RISC-V; shipping the same weight of either kind of chips should cost exactly the same amount. Yes, maybe the chip cost itself of a particular ARM-based model is $0.15 while the equivalent RISC-V chip costs $0.10, but if the issue (for him and other people who live outside US/Europe) is that shipping costs are orders of magnitude more expensive than the thing being shipped, that chip-cost difference becomes irrelevant.
I think he does make a great point about how fragmentation does give you better optionality: ARM is sort of like cable TV where you have a small number of product categories that each bundle a particular set of features, whereas with RISC-V you design something bespoke that does exactly what you need and nothing more. But again, this isn't going to affect shipping costs.
He's saying that shipping from the big western parts suppliers (Digikey, Mouser, Segger) costs a lot of money. When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free. It is very likely a good chunk of the overhead from western part suppliers has to do with export controls and risk aversion.
Aliexpress doesn't do any ID verification hassle. This is all an argument more about distribution and shipping. RISK-V is going to win because getting the parts is insanely cheap and without overhead.
The "fix" is probably Digikey, Mouser, and Segger need to just let buyers check a box where they assume all liability and parts are just thrown in the mail and forgot about - something aliexpress is great at doing.
Is the only source for ARM chips the big Western parts suppliers? If not, and you can get them from AliExpress or Crowd Supply, then, again, there's no difference in shipping between ARM and RISC-V chips.
A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results, so I don't think your argument refutes anything I said.
> A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results
Most of those are going to either be fake, or a clone with all kinds of weird compatibility issues. You might even get recycled chips, scavenged from e-waste.
You can buy STM32s from LCSC (Chinese equivalent of Digikey). They're probably not fake - LCSC is a fairly established trusted manufacturer.
China makes a huge majority of the world's electronics, and a big chunk of those will have ARM microcontrollers on them. Of course Chinese suppliers can get genuine ARM chips.
> When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free.
China has amazing prices for genuine electronics components from every manufacturer. Including stm32, NXP as well as local arm32 licensees gd32,hk32,XHSC. From which you can buy Cortex-M0+ down to 10-20cents per piece.
Literally anything you can buy in the West, you get for fraction of the price in China, even in small volumes.
If you live in the third world you wouldn't even think about ordering from "western parts supplier", everything is expensive and overpriced and selection is shit (compared to China).
It's not just Western shipping parts. You can buy cheap Indian parts, and have the very, same insane shipping costs as with "Western" parts. Ie a 2€ part from India will still cost 25€, whilst the 2€ part from China will cost 2-4€
The other thing he doesn't mention is time, I live in AoNZ and we do get free shipping from Digikey if we order over a minimum (~$60US) - but the big deal is time - you have to order everything you need ahead of time and get it all to arrive - miss one thing and you're stuck with a PCB and a box of bits and are sitting on your hands for a couple of weeks - you have to be incredibly organised - it's why I have a cabinet of SMD reels most of which I'll never use (reels of common components are ~$2 while visiting Shenzhen a couple of hundred $$ saves you a bunch of pain)
Living in the US and having free overnight delivery is 1st world luxury
Also note: LCSC sells PY32 Arm Cortex-M0 (PY32C642-C) for half the price (0.06$) of the cheapest CH32 [CH32V005D6U6] (0.11$). Given it has half the RAM, but price matching yields a better chip for less or the same money.
STMicroelectronics also launched the STM32C0 series that is still quite cheap @ ~0.35$/piece.
However, the prices on aliexpress all mishmash so giving a correct quote is impossible as the same chip is sold at wildly different prices by different sellers.
In addition to what you wrote... what does China use? One could argue that the factories there have very low cost of shipping + economies of scale - they order thousands of units, if not tens of thousands.
Then probably RISC-V being "open" license is the key to its success, even if the architecture itself is weird.
I don't know if we should jump immediately to that conclusion. The article has plenty of tiny typographical/grammatical errors suggesting it was human written, or at the very least a human was significantly involved in the loop.
I hadn't thought about it, but yeah, that does sound like Claude.
But it doesn't change the question; I still expect authors to be responsible for the meaning of what they post, regardless of whether they fully wrote it themselves or not. Yes, I know, silly me.
I don't get how both things can be true. The cost to ship something to Trinidad and Tobago has nothing to do with whether it's ARM or RISC-V; shipping the same weight of either kind of chips should cost exactly the same amount. Yes, maybe the chip cost itself of a particular ARM-based model is $0.15 while the equivalent RISC-V chip costs $0.10, but if the issue (for him and other people who live outside US/Europe) is that shipping costs are orders of magnitude more expensive than the thing being shipped, that chip-cost difference becomes irrelevant.
I think he does make a great point about how fragmentation does give you better optionality: ARM is sort of like cable TV where you have a small number of product categories that each bundle a particular set of features, whereas with RISC-V you design something bespoke that does exactly what you need and nothing more. But again, this isn't going to affect shipping costs.