The "much faster things" are coming at the expected rate.

Hardware simply takes many years to go from a company starting to work on a core, to having the core ready for licensing (at which point it works in an FPGA), to someone taking that and designing an SoC around it, to taping out the SoC, to getting back a few test chips (MPW, "shuttle run"), to fixing problems and taping out again, to volume production of chips, to yes another company designing a board around the chip, to getting that manufacturer, to it being available in a shop or on a web site.

It's no different in the ARM or x86 worlds, you just don't tend to hear about projects at such an early stage.

The D1 boards are the best available right now for under $30, or under $150 for that matter.

SiFive's U74 core is significantly better, being dual-issue with a limited out-of-order capability like the ARM A55 (it can issue two dependent instruction together, and execute the 2nd one in a later pipeline stage). The U74 is available (or was) in SiFive's FU-740 SoC on the HiFive Unmatched board. It's also in the StarFive JH7100 SoC which was on the 300 prototype "Starlight" boards the BeagleBoard Foundation gave away for free just over a year ago (I was lucky enough to get one) and now commercially available since December or so on the VisionFive V1 board for around $170. StarFive have been promising an improved JH7110 with four cores instead of two, and a GPU, for some time -- it was originally supposed to be out last September. Apparently it's still on the way.

The U74 core running at 1.4 or 1.5 GHz sits somewhere between a Pi 3 and Pi4 in performance.

There is presumably potential for someone to put a JH7100 SoC on a cheaper board e.g. a CM-style board.

Something else that is available right now as a chip and on a board is the Alibaba "ICE" SoC. This has three Xuantie C910 OoO cores, one with a high performance vector unit (2 vector pipes, each 1 cycle/instruction, vs the single 3-cycle pipe in the C906 in the D1). This is fully in Pi 4 territory. The "ICE EVB" board is available to buy. I have one. It's what the RISC-V version of Android is being developed on, and the board comes from the factory with an early version of Android in the onboard eMMC. It's $399, including a 7" touch screen.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003395978459.html

Again, someone could potentially quite quickly take that SoC and put it on a cheaper board if they saw a market opportunity. The SoC exists, works, and is in production at some level.

In the "not here but coming soon" category is Intel's "Horse Creek" platform, which wraps SiFive P550 cores in Intel IP for caches and peripherals. According to SiFive, that SoC is in production at the fab right now, and boards (the replacement for the HiFive Unmatched) should be demonstrated later in the year.

Depending on what MHz that hits (it's being made as the first chip produced on the "Intel 4" process) that should be performance competitive with the Rockchip RK3588 ARM A76 boards that have come out in the last month or so. In x86 terms, that may be somewhere around Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge.

In the more distant future, Apple is suing a startup called Rivos for hiring away too many M1 engineers who have taken too many M1 secrets with them. Rivos have said they're making a high performance RISC-V chip. Rivos celebrated its 1 year anniversary a couple of days ago.

Very interestingly, I think, Apple is not asking for an injunction to stop Rivos, or for fixed damages, but for a royalty on their (eventual!) sales. That's of course going to be at least three years away before you can buy one. But there's no reason to think it won't be M1-class. They have the people, the experience, and the funding.