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As cool as this is, enough with the FPGAs and the RISC-V Arduino clones. A real, relatively inexpensive (e.g. sub $100) RISC-V SoM/board that can run Linux is desperately needed (with at least at BeagleBone Black performance levels).

I really like the idea of RISC-V and I'm willing to make the investment in software (and in fact have done so with QEMU), I just can't get any real hardware (for a non-silly price).

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I think the main barrier to a cheap RISC-V board like you describe is a real Android port. By "real" I mean it needs working ART and V8 compiler ports so apps and web pages don't run at 10% of the speed of low-end ARM chips.

Once that exists, I think we'll see companies develop RISC-V chips cheap enough for low-end smartphones and other IoT devices. Those are the chips that are cheap enough to put in a <$100 board.

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