I hope you enjoy secret proprietary blobs in RYF hardware.
RYF certification decreases freedom, it doesn't increase it. The qualification for RYF is that the user not be able to see any blobs, not that they don't exist. As a result, manufacturers hide and bury the blobs in order to achieve compliance. Meanwhile, more open devices with optional replaceable blobs are denied certification.
I have a C906 and while it's fun, it's very very slow by 2021 standards: single core, scalar in-order @ 1.0 GHz with no L2$.
The upcoming BeagleV is a lot faster (I have the beta): quad core, dual issue in-order @1.5 GHz (TBD) with 2 MiB L2.
I'm expecting (guessing) that the triple-issue OoO P550 would be 5-10X faster at iso-frequency, but if history repeats it'll be four+ years before we see it in silicon for sale.
Maybe 2 to 2.5 years. The U74 core in the BeagleV and Unmatched was announced October 2018. If not for COVID it probably would have shipped six months ago.
The C906 core in Allwinner D1 SoC will make an excellent competitor to the Pi Zero when it ships on the promised $10 to $15 Sipeed and Pine64 boards later in the year -- and that will be a real price where you can buy as many as you want, not the "$5 but you can only buy one" fake Pi Zero price.
The $99 "Nezha" board with the D1 is of course not value-competitive for that performance level. It's a manufacturer's (i.e. Allwinner) prototype board for volume manufacturers such as Pine64 to use to develop software while they work on their own board.
The same goes for the HiFive Unmatched. It's not intended for volume production, it's for developers to use to prepare software for later high volume boards (including the BeagleV).
If they do I hope those chips get better mainline Linux kernel support than the ARM based ones. The work the Armbian devs are doing is amazing, but they are still missing drivers from the manufacturer. Mainly for proper graphics and video encoding/decoding. The only operating system where this works well is in Android with an archaic kernel.
The CPU support is already pretty good and for example Huawei is pushing important Linux kernel patches.
What you are talking about is drivers for peripherals, which is are SoC-level issues, and really up to the partners (like Allwinner, SiPeed, etc). So far documentation is the most critical part and it's a very mixed bag. I think this will be much like the Arm experience, albeit everyone is at least using device trees these days.
