A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

	A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”(rvembedded.com)
	605 points by Narishma 5 days ago \| 321 comments
	tl;dr: An embedded engineer in Trinidad rebuts Dmitry Grinberg's RISC-V critique, arguing that Grinberg himself derived that RV32EC is ideal for cheap microcontrollers, then complained the resulting chips exist. The author counters that RISC-V's real value isn't ISA elegance but accessibility: a single instruction set scales from 10-cent CH32V003 parts to MMU-equipped SoCs running Linux, with open toolchains and no licensing walls—unlike ARM's segmented Cortex-M/A product boundaries. For engineers outside the US/EU facing prohibitive shipping and licensing costs, RISC-V's price and openness matter more than encoding purity.
	HN Discussion: ↓Author contradicts himself by citing high shipping costs while claiming 10-cent parts matter over $1 parts ~The two articles talk past each other, addressing different scopes (embedded vs. general performance) ↓Shipping costs to developing nations are overstated; Asia-to-Africa/Asia routes are cheap ↑RISC-V's openness and pricing pressure on incumbents validates the accessibility argument ~Both critiques are valid; RISC-V can be both an improvement and still have fixable flaws