This is something I'm excitedly watching as well. It's one thing to put out a free rv32i microcontroller and quite another to put out not just one but a regular stream of cores that keep raising the performance bar. The classic CPU industry is still squeezing out 10%+ performance gains per generation every year or two. Unless these large organizations start collaborating to make these chips faster (...doubtful unfortunately), I suspect they'll fall behind and stay behind.