There's zero mention of hardware specs or cost beyond architecture and core counts... What is the purpose of this post?

Anyway, it's hardly surprising that a young ISA with not a 1/1000th of the investment of x86 or ARM has slower chips than them x)

On benchmarks, for more precision details, I recommend the RISC-V Vector (RVV) benchmarks[1], maintained by Olaf Bernsten. He only covers the Vector stuff, but with great depth.

[1] https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/