And then OP rants about cost of debugger

> A debugger for an ARM part alone a Segger J-Link costs about $600, though I guess for that $100, and add another $100 to ship,so about $200 I could get an EDU edition J-link and no chips or boards. Yaay.

This is bad comparison, you can debug arm soc with <10$ debugger too/

i think the part that you're missing is that this is what it's like for him and people in similar regions where a huge amount of things aren't an option to begin with and many more things are far more expensive than in the US or Europe. a lot of the article is about how the best part about RISC-V is that the chips and tools are available to more of the world.

I also live in 3rd country, and i know the pain.

But if you can access to RISC V IC/tools, you can access ARM IC/tools. The Chinese basically spams those ARM IC as many(if not more) as RISC V IC.

To me the author tried to hate ARM for no reason.

Yeah you can get <$1 STM32 dev boards and <$4 ST-Link dongles off Aliexpress. At my last job, we kept a big bag of the ST-Link dongles in the office, then whenever someone needed to debug something they could just keep the dongle attached to that board from that point on. It was a lot more convenient than having a single expensive debugger that you had to connect and disconnect.

You can avoid the shipping cost by shipping from china, but then only RISC v chips are reliable.

I really doubt that, unless someone did some research, there is no proof that those cheap RISC V chip are more reliable than those clone ARM chip.

I bet they use the same pipeline to produce those chip anyway.