SiFive's boards are always more expensive than 3rd party boards using the same CPU cores. They are aimed primarily at SiFive IP customers who are designing their own chips, to develop software on before their chips are ready.

> Is this in par with or faster than comparable ARM, ADM or Intel processors at the same price level?

rwjm's package build benchmark shows it as 25% faster than a comparable µarch Raspberry Pi 4.

It's been some time since Intel or AMD had similar products: I guess something around Pentium III, Pentium M, or early Core 2.

Prices are a function of production volume (and features / quality, but mostly volume).

The Pi 4 is if course a mass-market product and is cheaper. Arm's own "Juno" A72 dev board is $10,000, which is 20x more than this SiFive board.

https://www.elementsearch.com/arm-v2m-juno-0317d-evaluation-...

> What is the upside?

It (and Sipeed, Pine64, Milk-V boards with the same SoC) is the fastest RISC-V hardware, per core, currently available.

The $2500 Milk-V Pioneer is overall faster due to having 64 cores (and 128 GB RAM, 32 PCIe lanes), but is slightly slower per core.

You buy these early dev boards because you want or need RISC-V for some reason, not because you want the cheapest fastest hardware of any kind.

Open source, open ISA, embedded systems. That’s it.

We are still years away from boards where they are interesting to people who are only interested in laptop or higher performance classes.

Not an unreasonable price for a dev board.

The key part is 'dev' - it's for people doing development on the platform.