FE310 appears to outperform every state-of-the-art official ARM core (and perhaps every architecture-licensee core) in its class, with maximum stable clock spee

FE310 appears to outperform every state-of-the-art official ARM core (and perhaps every architecture-licensee core) in its class, with maximum stable clock speeds also much higher. BooM could be described as beating Cortex A15 and matching Cortex A53 (granted without a tapeout to prove it, only simulations). Both of these designs are publicly available and under licenses which allow proprietary derivatives. In every category; die area, power dissipation, total throughput, licensing cost, lead time, design flexibility, code density, technical debt, academic buy-in; real RISC-V cores which have been made in silicon are right-now beating ARM cores. At this point, ARM has but two things going for it: legacy and design maturity. Once RISC-V designs are mature enough to be expected to run all general-purpose software correctly; there will be few other axes to compete on. RISC-V has an immense zero-day advantage in its clean, worldly design. I think it would be foolish to downplay the likelihood of great success.