>the best processors (apple, by miles IMO) are ARM? I notice your "the best" actually is artificially restricted to something very narrow, I have to assume you

>the best processors (apple, by miles IMO) are ARM? I notice your "the best" actually is artificially restricted to something very narrow, I have to assume you mean "the fastest" at some specific TDP, which happens to be the one M1/M2 target. This is evident, as if you had more watts available, there are faster chips out there which were not designed by Apple. And the reason there's no RISC-V chips targeting M1 out there yet is quite simple: Hardware development cycles are long. Most RISC-V CPUs out there are based on the very first ratified privileged and unprivileged specs from 2019. Next year, the first ones based on the batch of specs ratified in 2021, which are important for performance (bit manipulation, vector, hypervisor and so on) are expected to show up. One of them is Tenstorrent's Ascalon, and the lead of the team that designed that one is the same man who led M1 at Apple. They've done presentations in which they present performance as competitive with projected Zen5, yet at lower power and smaller area. Yet there are a lot of definitions for "the best" outside of your narrow focus. For instance, ARM has a range of processors targeting a range of markets, including microcontroller, LITTLE cores, realtime, fault-tolerant and so on. Most of these are bested in Power Performance Area by RISC-V designs already in the market. SiFive does, by itself, manage this much, but there are already tens of companies offering hundreds of competitive designs for licensing. RISC-V is inevitable.