There are like a zillion Chinese single board computers out there. What's so special about raspberry pi that it's worth a half a billion dollar valuation?
Well, I suppose some of that suggests optimism about selling boards to commercial customers (in spite of all the assurances about still having enough to sell to hobbyists). And commercial customers, just like hobbyists, want SBCs that have decent hw and working, maintained sw. Which is sadly not the case for pretty much any of the competitors, not reliably.
Because they actually provide updates and support to the platform.
All the Chinese boards release a single OS, Linux packages maintained on some strange .cn domain. Something is wrong with the wifi chip driver but they don't care, they've moved on to the next iteration.
This. There are a billion SBCs on the market and most of them are irrelevant because you're stuck with some janky image from an out-of-date kernel that probably even the original company can't recreate from source. Hobbyists who enjoy tinkering with them for a few months after they buy them might not mind, but it's not gonna work for the big buyers and it's not great for educational purposes either.
Well, the fact that both Microchip and Nordic Semiconductor are shipping actual chips based on RISC-V says that if it's not this year, the year is really close.
Yes, there have been an assortment of dodgy "RISC-V" chips from dodgy Chinese suppliers that would appear and disappear like spectral invaders from another dimension.
Until last year, though, I couldn't plan around being able to buy and put a RISC-V chip in a product. Now I can.