Producing a really high end CPU just be muscle flexing. Anybody can do that.
Having apps run on it is a whole another story.
You say that, but nobody has actually done so. HiFive has produced some CPUs that would qualify as extremely low end desktop CPUs, but nothing that can compete with even middle of the road processors like an i5 or a Ryzen 5. As for apps, it would be pretty trivial to get a huge swath of Linux apps running on it, and if there was enough of a base and demand you’d see companies producing RISC-V binaries as well (much like they’re starting to for ARM). For emulation layers I’m sure something could be done, QEMU if nothing else could probably be used.
You say that, but nobody has actually done so. HiFive has produced some CPUs that would qualify as extremely low end desktop CPUs, but nothing that can compete with even middle of the road processors like an i5 or a Ryzen 5. As for apps, it would be pretty trivial to get a huge swath of Linux apps running on it, and if there was enough of a base and demand you’d see companies producing RISC-V binaries as well (much like they’re starting to for ARM). For emulation layers I’m sure something could be done, QEMU if nothing else could probably be used.