There are getting to be a good number of SoCs reaching actual silicon in small batches, and available on relatively expensive boards ($100 to $665). They work. You can buy them.
Hopefully some of them go into mass production, which should drop the production cost for the actual chips to $5 or so and boards to something like Pi prices (there are dozens of companies that can make boards once chips are available).
Having the core and chip designed and progressed to working test silicon is by far the hardest part already done.
I think the lack of excitement is misplaced! RISC-V is already amazingly successful, and I would argue it is already the most widely available technology.
Tens of high quality OSS HDL implementations that target FPGAs and ASICs. Many tens of successful hardware implementations, already shipping multiple billions of cores.
The board Bruce mentions is an amazing value. A board in that form factor that you can bring up a graphical Linux and the distros are already targeting it.
You can get a 4-Stage 160Mhz RV32IMC with 400K of SRAM for $1 in the form of an ESP32-C3. Dev board for $15.
There are getting to be a good number of SoCs reaching actual silicon in small batches, and available on relatively expensive boards ($100 to $665). They work. You can buy them.
Hopefully some of them go into mass production, which should drop the production cost for the actual chips to $5 or so and boards to something like Pi prices (there are dozens of companies that can make boards once chips are available).
Having the core and chip designed and progressed to working test silicon is by far the hardest part already done.
Price then comes down to production volume.