[dzaima]

Might not be "worse" (I'd definitely agree that the difference is plenty small enough to be considered equal within error bounds), but is certainly not something worthy of RISC-V being noted as doing "great" either.

Excluding extensions is perhaps a significant question, but, for example, Debian RISC-V currently targets rv64gc, which should have the same instruction counts as rv64g does, so software compiled for Debian can't use the later extensions for most code anyway. (never mind that ARMv8 also has excluded extensions, namely NEON, which is always present on ARMv8 and is not designed to be ignored)

And, of course, even being better than ARM is not equivalent to being the best it could be; ARMv8 isn't some attempt at a magical optimal instruction set, it's designed for whatever ARM needed, and that includes being able to efficiently share hardware with ARMv7 for backwards compatibility.

[snvzz]

If RISC-V is not worse (it is not) and yet it is much simpler (it is), that is a huge win.

Simplicity has enormous value.