Third World Engineer Responds to RISC-V Criticism
Original: A third world engineer responds to ”RISC-V: They should have known better“
Why This Matters
Highlights how RISC-V's low-cost ecosystem creates access for underserved global engineering communities.
A Trinidad-based embedded engineer rebutted Dmitry Grinberg's widely-read RISC-V critique, arguing that the architecture's low-cost hardware access matters far more than ISA elegance for engineers in developing nations facing $60–$200 shipping costs per order.
Dmitry Grinberg published a detailed critique of RISC-V titled 'They Should Have Known Better,' which reached the front page of Hacker News and sparked debate on Lobsters. The piece criticized the architecture's design choices, including compressed store offsets and Zicsr as a separate extension. An embedded engineer based in Trinidad and Tobago responded on rvembedded.com, acknowledging some of Grinberg's technical points while challenging his framing. The author notes that in Trinidad, shipping a single chip from Digikey or Mouser can cost between US $60 and US $200, and that 'free shipping' promotions common in the US and Europe do not apply. The author states this pricing gap is not a minor detail: it determines whether a classroom of 30 students each has a chip or shares one demo board. The author argues that Grinberg's analysis overlooks RISC-V's most significant real-world impact — making ultra-low-cost MCUs like the CH32V003 accessible to engineers and students in Nigeria, Bangladesh, and similar markets. The author has personally migrated their full stack from STM32/ARM to RISC-V and is writing a book on CH32V003 development. While acknowledging ISA quirks, the engineer contends that hardware accessibility must be evaluated before instruction set elegance.