I think the bigger question is does RISC-V need to be fast? Who wants to make it fast?
I'm a chip designer and I see people using RISC-V as small processor cores for things like PCIE link training or various bookkeeping tasks. These don't need to be fast, they need to be small and low power which means they will be relatively slow.
Most people on tech review sites only care about desktop / laptop / server performance. They may know about some of the ARM Cortex A series CPUs that have MMUs and can run desktop or smartphone Linux versions.
They generally don't care about the ARM Cortex M or R versions for embedded and real time use. Those are the areas where you don't need high performance and where RISC-V is already replacing ARM.
EDIT:
I'll add that there are companies that COULD make a fast RISC-V implementation.
Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, or Nvidia could redirect their existing teams to design a high performance RISC-V CPU. But why should they? They are heavily invested in their existing x86 and ARM CPU lines. Amazon and Google are using licensed ARM cores in their server CPUs.
What is the incentive for any of them to make a high performance RISC-V CPU? The only reason I can think of is that Softbank keeps raising ARM licensing costs and it gets high enough that it is more profitable to hire a team and design your own RISC-V CPU.
Of your list, Qualcomm and Nvidia are fairly likely to make high perf Riscv cpus. Qualcomm because Arm sued them to try and stop them from designing their own arm chips without paying a lot more money, and Nvidia because they already have a lot of teams making riscv chips, so it seems likely that they will try to unify on the one that doesn't require licensing.
Yeah, they could but then what is the market? Qualcomm wants to sell smartphone chips and Android can run on RISC-V and most Android Java apps could in theory run.
But if you look at the Intel x86 smartphone chips from about 10 years ago they had to make an ARM to x86 emulator because even the Java apps contained native ARM instructions for performance reasons.
Qualcomm is trying to push their ARM Snapdragon chips in Windows laptops but I don't think they are selling well.
Nvidia could also make RISC-V based chips but where would they go? Nvidia is moving further away from the consumer space to the data center space. So even if Nvidia made a really fast RISC-V CPU it would probably be for the server / data center market and they may not even sell it to ordinary consumers.
Or if they did it could be like the Ampere ARM chips for servers. Yeah you can buy one as an ordinary consumer but they were in the $4,000 range last time I looked. How many people are going to buy that?
> Qualcomm is trying to push their ARM Snapdragon chips in Windows laptops but I don't think they are selling well.
That definitely seems to be the case. I think they likely would have more luck with Riscv phones (much less app brand loyalty). or servers (arm in the server has done a lot better than on windows)
For Nvidia, if they made a consumer riscv cpu it would be a gaming handheld/console (Switch 3 or similar) once the AI bubble pops. Before that, likely would be server cpus that cost $10k for big AI systems. Before that, I could see them expanding the role of Riscv in their GPUs (likely not visible to to users).
Many PC hardware enthusiasts say they want a RISC-V or ARM CPU but then when these system exist they don't actually want them.
Why? Because they want something like a $300 CPU and $150 motherboard using standard DDR4/5 DIMMs that is RISC-V or ARM or something not x86 but is faster than x86. The sub $1000 systems that hardware companies make that are RISC-V or ARM chips are low end embedded single board systems that are too slow for these people. The really fast systems are $4000 server level chips that they can't afford. The only company really bringing fast non-x86 CPUs with consumer level pricing is Apple. We can also include Qualcomm but I'm skeptical of the software infrastructure and compatibility since they are relying on x86 emulation for windows.
China is likely where it would come from - ARM and x86 are owned by Western companies.
> I think the bigger question is does RISC-V need to be fast? Who wants to make it fast?
Honestly, the initial reaction is it sounds like cope, and I know this because I've been saying it for ages to angry reactions. RISC-V looks for all the world like it is designed for competing with the 32 bit Arm ecosystem but that the designers didn't, and still don't, understand what 64 bit Arm is about.
Secondly, it's been necessary to claim such things are forever on the way in order to maintain hype and get software support. Without it you wouldn't see nearly so much Linux buildchain work. (See the open source SuperH implementations for what happens if you admit you don't go for high performance).
Finally though, as process nodes get smaller you can afford to put much more complex blocks in the same area, which can then burst through a series of operations and power off again, many times a second. (Edit to add: of course you know that, but it's still counter intuitive the extent to which it changes things over time. People have things like floating point support in places that not too long ago would have been completely minimalist, and there are some really extreme examples around).
> I'll add that there are companies that COULD make a fast RISC-V implementation.
Again, there is no proof of this until it actually happens. When Qualcomm were trying they wanted to change the spec of RISC-V, and I strongly suspect that is actually necessary.