I don’t see how can high-end/competitive RISC-V cores could be fully open/free and without that how is it better than ARM.
Only ARM can license ARM cores to others.
Using RISC-V, any company who can design their own cores can also offer them for licensing.
There's already tens of companies offering hundreds of cores for licensing.
This is much better than ISA-enforced vendor lock-in, which is the situation with x86 and ARM.
arm and x86 are not royalty free ISAs, RISC-V is, then RISC-V is mechanically a better choice, until it does a good enough job.
And the companies that don’t want to make it their core business but can afford enough resources (e.g. Google, Apple, Amazon) would just use them to leverage their core products.
I could only see this on the lower end where margins/required R&D investment are relatively low.
> non-toxic IP cores with enough performance from RISC-V
Why would anyone also their designs to be used for free or for cheaper than ARM does?