Nezha (哪吒) is a protection deity in Chinese folk religion. His official Taoist name is "Marshal of the Central Altar" (中壇元帥). He was then given the title "Third Lotus Prince" (蓮花三太子) after he became a deity. [1]
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nezha-your-first-64bit-ri...
usb2.0, a 1GHz core... a rpi4 will wallop this little toy, just demolish the shit out of it, at 1/3rd the price. or go up & buy a fantastic amazing fairly small x86 (used on ebay) that will destroy both for 2x the price. i really want collaborative open source hardware to become a thing. but wow, risc-v has so far to go to become an in any way at all real challenger.
it just sucks so bad that whatever cpu cores we make, we'll be saddled with no pcie, crappy usb, short of paying big bucks for some IP (99% of the times coupled to some specific fab) that does the interesting bits, like providing usb3, pcie, and, frankly & most presently-important, the future standard to unite them all, thunderbolt4. also the lack of available open source gpus is strikingly notable, and even those who do have gpu IPs to sell rarely have drivers.
this sbc is a necessary step, part of the progress of freeing ourselves. but man, $99? yikes. paying so much to sacrifice so much performance for this cause is a really really really hard sell. to be fair, it's just unreasonable, impossible to compete with how affordable rpis are. but the far far far superior x86 offerings available at 2x the price is what really makes the situation untennable for RISC-V would-be's. we want very much to give the moral choice it's large profit margins, but right now it's such an incredibly unappealing value proposition.
This is a manufacturer’s evaluation board, simply being resold by Sipeed, RVboards, and others. As such it is an expensive full-featured board. The comparable in purpose ARM Juno board for the A72 and A53 and Mali is $10,000. (They probably have a newer one now, I haven't checked)
Sipeed and Pine64 and others will build much cheaper boards of their own ($10 to $12, competing against Pi Zero with a better product) using the same D1 SoC later in the year when production has ramped up and hopefully the general chip shortage has eased.
The most interesting thing about this SoC and board is it is the first RISC-V Vector processing hardware to ship, by probably at least 12 months if not 18. It implements the 0.7.1 draft of the spec, which is incompatible in a number of ways with the 1.0 spec that will be ratified this summer, but some code is binary compatible (e.g. a memcpy()) and it’s good for gaining experience with something at least similar to the final spec. I have test results showing considerable speedup:
http://hoult.org/d1_memcpy.txt http://hoult.org/d1_strcpy.txt
ARM is also some way from having their similar SVE in consumer SoCs/boards.
Also the BeagleV "StarLight" will be out in September at $119 for a board with 4 dual issue U74 cores (comparable to the ARM A55 minus NEON) running at 1.5 GHz with 4 GB RAM. That will still be slower than a Pi 4 but significantly faster than a Pi 3. At a higher price, certainly. But it's huge progress. I have a beta BeagleV and it's good, though significantly inferior to the mass production board.
Don't forget the Pi 4 didn't exist two years ago, and RISC-V didn't exist as a buyable product until the Arduino-compatible HiFive1 in December 2016. There will be RISC-V boards performance comparable to the Pi 4 in 2022 (using Alibaba C910 or SiFive U84 cores). Will there be a Pi 5 in 2022? Maybe, but I'd bet against it. Their cadence isn't that fast. Who knows -- the Pi 5 might yet be RISC-V.
Until one of these ships, though, none of them have a claim about being first.