Comment by brucehoult

> I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance

No one with any true knowledge of RISC-V would ever make such a claim. Know-nothing marketers might, I suppose, but why would you listen to them rather than to actual insiders?

The current newest RISC-V boards (Megrez and Titan and whatever the upcoming SpacemiT K3 ones are called) are solidly in mid-range Core 2 territory, especially K3 which has SMID/vectors which the other fast chips currently don't.

Older boards using JH7110, TH1520, K1 are closer to Pentium III or PowerPC G4 though with 4 or 8 cores instead of 1, but without an equivalent to the SSE or Altivec SIMD those old, or if they have it with near zero software using it.

Late this year is expected to see RISC-V products with performance in Skylake to Zen 2 performance levels, verging on M1 (M1 IPC but lower MHz).

> they are much slower than similar priced arm systems

Irrelevant to the technology. They are competitive with similar µarch (five years older) Arm systems.

Price can never be competitive (assuming no deliberate loss-making) until production and sales volumes are similar. Which can't happen until performance matches current Arm and X86 performance -- which RISC-V is converging with quite quickly, certainly by 2030.