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.