The RISC-V Argument Looks Different From Trinidad

Armstrong Subero, an embedded engineer working out of Trinidad and Tobago, published a response to Dmitry Grinberg's widely-shared critique "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better." He concedes several of Grinberg's technical points — compressed store offsets are strange, Zicsr should not be a separate extension you have to remember to request — and says he has hit every one of them writing a book on the CH32V003.

His disagreement is with the framing. Grinberg's central claim is that the needs of a high-end CPU and a cost-saving microcontroller core are diametrically opposed, so no single ISA serves both. Subero's counter is that Grinberg's own article derives requirements for a cheap core, lands on RV32EC, and concedes RISC-V will own that segment — then spends the rest of the piece annoyed the chip exists.

The argument that will land hardest with builders is the logistics one. Subero says shipping a dollar chip to his location costs US $60–200, that a PCB sponsor turned him down purely on shipping, and that distributors have refused orders based on location or name. Against that, he reports covering a full vertical stack — CH32V003 at ten cents, a dual-core CH32H417 board at $20, a Baochip Dabao at $9.50 — for under US $100 total, versus roughly $600 for a Segger J-Link alone on the ARM side.

The technical claims are one engineer's account, not independently verified, and the article text available here is truncated before his final section. The costs are his own, from one country.