alt Hacker News> RISC-V will get there, eventually.
Not trolling: I legitimately don't see why this is assumed to be true. It is one of those things that is true only once it has been achieved. Otherwise we would be able to create super high performance Sparc or SuperH processors, and we don't.
As you note, Arm once was fast, then slow, then fast. RISC-V has never actually been fast. It has enabled surprisingly good implementations by small numbers of people, but competing at the high end (mobile, desktop or server) it is not.
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RISC-V doesn't have the pitfalls of Sparc (register windows, branch delay slots), largely because we learned from that. It's in fact a very "boring" architecture. There's no one that expects it'll be hard to optimize for. There are at least 2 designs that have taped out in small runs and have high end performance.
Because today, getting a fast CPU out it isn't as much an engineering issue as it is about getting the investment for hiring a world-class fab.
The most promising RISC-V companies today have not set out to compete directly with Intel, AMD, Apple or Samsung, but are targeting a niche such as AI, HPC and/or high-end embedded such as automotive.
And you can bet that Qualcomm has RISC-V designs in-house, but only making ARM chips right now because ARM is where the market for smartphone and desktop SoCs is. Once Google starts allowing RVA23 on Android / ChromeOS, the flood gates will open.
I don't think anybody suggests Oracle couldn't make faster SPARC processors, it's just that development of SPARC ended almost 10 years ago. At the time SPARC was abandoned, it was very competitive.
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.