A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better"

A Third World embedded engineer from Trinidad and Tobago responds to Dmitry Grinberg's critical article about RISC-V by arguing that Grinberg's focus on instruction set elegance misses the more important advantage: RISC-V's accessibility to developers in underserved regions where hardware shipping costs are prohibitively expensive. The author emphasizes that for students and engineers in developing nations, the cost difference between a ten-cent and one-dollar chip is transformative—making RISC-V's affordable microcontrollers genuinely meaningful where Western-centric discussions dismiss it. While acknowledging some of Grinberg's legitimate technical critiques, the author contends that RISC-V's real value lies in democratizing hardware access for the "other 99%" outside the US and Europe.