If I may ask (I'm pretty bad with hardware, but learning):
What does "RISC-V" is royalty free mean? Does that make an RPi more expensive because they have to pay ARM?
What do the H.265/H.264 encoder/decoders do? Is that important when connecting a USB camera (converting from whatever the camera provides to H.265/H.264)? And then is it the same thing, i.e. that an RPi is more expensive because it has to pay to use H.265/H.264?
More than the royalties, shouldn't we care about binary blobs? The more open the hardware is, the easier it is for the community to maintain it, right?
> What does "RISC-V" is royalty free mean? Does that make an RPi more expensive because they have to pay ARM?
The RISC-V foundation published the specs for RISC-V and the extensions. These are available royalty-free and can be implemented by anyone. There are various chip designers that create RISC-V compatible CPU cores, and you would pay one of these companies to incorporate that design onto your own chip. Or you could adapt one of the open-source CPU designs, but those are not very high-performance. Or you could design your own, like Western Digital has.
For an ARM design, you pay a license fee to ARM Ltd, even if you design your own core.
So what really matters is how much you are paying to license the CPU core, if you don't design it yourself.
> More than the royalties, shouldn't we care about binary blobs? The more open the hardware is, the easier it is for the community to maintain it, right?
Yes, but the chip vendor needs to publish full documentation for the hardware too. Without that, it is harder to write your own device driver software.
H.265/H.264: Where is AV1? Coze risc-v is worldwide royalty free, not h.265/h264.
HDMI: same issue than H.265/H.264, I should see a dedicated display usb-c connector (displayport).
But I am being excessive, it is going in the right direction, the next step is to remove H.265/H.264 and HDMI royalties.
That said, has the GPU a lean, plain and simple C written, vulkan3D open source driver?