> 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.