I have two points here:<p>1) It's a great pity an in-order RISC-V machine similar to A55 was not tested -- the obvious choice being SiFive's own U74 core which in the JH7110 is probably the most common RISC-V SBC and laptop SoC of the last two years, in the VisionFive 2, the Pine64 Star64, the Milk-V Mars, the DC-Roma laptop and so on.<p>As they say, on many tasks a well-implemented in-order CPU can be very competitive with a small OoO.<p>I have both VisionFive 2 (1.5 GHz) and the C910 Lichee Pi 4A (1.85 GHz). While the C910 wins most micro-benchmarks (memcpy, primes, Dhrystone and Coremark etc) on the real-world things I use a computer for the VisionFive 2 is <i>always</i> faster. Even something simple like launching emacs. It's significantly faster on building a Linux Kernel (67m35s vs 88m4s), or compiling GNU binutils & GCC or running the CoreCLR unit test suite<p>2) the P550 is not limited to the 1.4 GHz its being run at here. SiFive is clearly being very conservative. Eswin say the chip runs at 1.8 GHz and so do Milk-V with their "Megrez" SBC which (with 16 GB RAM) is half the price of the HiFive Premier P550 at $199 vs $399. I have one currently 4 days into transit from Arace in China to New Zealand. Perhaps I'll have it next week. A number of other people reported on Reddit that theirs have also shipped.<p>The Eswin SoC is a 2nd choice fallback plan after Intel apparently shut down their "Horse Creek" project using the P550. Intel said Horse Creek would be "2+ GHz" and they demonstrated a test chip running at 2.2 GHz at Intel Innovation 2022 Developer Conference in October 2022, almost 2 1/2 years ago. That had been expected to ship in summer 2023.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221101114447/https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7277/intel-sifive-demo-high-performance-risc-v-horse-creek-dev-platform-on-intel-4-process/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20221101114447/https://fuse.wiki...</a>