Some background on the performance claims from The Register :

Alibaba claims the machine’s single-core general-purpose performance “exceeded 70 points in the SPECint 2006 benchmark test.” Photos from Tuesday event at which Alibaba announced the chip suggest its SPECInt 2017 benchmark result is 2.6GHz. Per analysis by Google researcher Laurie Kirk puts it nearly on par with Apple’s M1 chip – which the iGiant launched in the year 2020.

M1 level performance (I am curious if it matches the M1 on efficiency) is not bad for RISC-V.

"Highest performing RISC-V" does not mean a lot. Most contemporary ARM cores will run circles around this chip.

Fair, but atleast they do didn't have to pay anybody for the "license" to use it.

Other commenter is mentioning M1 performance.. Not bad.

Well, it is either pay a license fee for a mature and fast design, or use a free design that still has to catch up performancewise.

Both have their uses.