It's a far better measure than "despite all the years of unfulfilled hype and promises we'll absolutely have a smorgasbord of performant RISC-V cores Real Soon Now". Single core performance down in the Intel Core range? Needs 96 cores to even be competitive on a handful of benchmarks that don't equal a modern users compute needs? The competition isn't sitting on their hands, and RISC-V hasn't delivered the performance it's fanbois have told us is 'inevitable'. Loongson has at least managed late-2010s levels of performance.

Maybe RISC-V will completely take over the embedded market. That's not a bad gig. High volume, tho slim margins, lot's of niches for lots of innovation (want to continue to go crazy with ISA extension? Not a big deal in the embedded world). But they're still selling billions of 8051s, ARM is ubiquitous but even they didn't take over that world, and I know how I would lay my bets there, too.

I'd rather look at all the data available. If you want to compare to Loongson, you have to include the 20 years head start that this company has in developing microarchitectures, a big part of which can be transferred to the Loongson designs. And factor in the strategic investments in China who doesn't want to depend on ARM and x86, while in the Western world people were happy with x86 and ARM and big money is mostly flowing to AI chips, where RISC-V is successful.

Then there is Xiangshan Kunminghu... For some reason the most powerful open source CPU is RISC-V. Chinese and not Loongson.

There is no data to suggest RISCV can ever be competitive in the large core space. The longer this absence goes on (now approaching 15 years) the more evidence there is that it is structurally incapable of competitive implementations.

If you wanted to create a project to distract a whole generation of computer architects from getting anywhere this is exactly what it would look like.

At some point we have to accept it isn’t happening.