Does the RED-V Thing Plus have any on-board ram other than the 16KB scratchpad? It seems weird for such a powerful board to only have 16KB of ram, but I don’t see mention of anything else. The larger RED-V RedBoard mentions 32MB of QSPI flash but I don’t see that for the Thing Plus. It would certainly be useful. Thanks.
No. It has 16K RAM and that’s it. That was a processor design choice, and has nothing to do with the SparkFun implementation.
There is no traditional instruction flash inside the processor. All instructions live in an off-chip serial flash. As a result, the processor implements an instruction cache to help mitigate the high latency of reading from the external serial flash.
At first glance, it does seem a bit weird to have the flash-to-RAM ratio tipped so heavily towards flash, but that is only because the external serial flash chips are so huge and cheap.