Radical personalization is the present and future of many industries. Now it's available in CPUs to
o.
So if I understand correctly, RISC-V is more intended for high volume SoC type customers who want to make specialized cores? (i.e. the Western Digital use case).
I don't think you can distil one single thing that a standard backed by 100+ companies is "intended for".
It's a free and open standard that software can be written to, and that anyone is free to implement in any way they chose: hardware, software (interpret/JIT), or FPGA.
It is intended that nothing in RISC-V disqualify is from being applicable to everything from the smallest (32 bit) microcontroller to the largest supercomputer, and everything between. See for example the European Processor Initiative which is developing processors for supercomputers. Based on the RISC-V ISA.
I looked through the SiFive site and it seems the message is that you can get your own custom SoC made quicker.
SiFive is just one company of many doing things with RISC-V. It happens to be one of the first out of the starting gate (founded in September 2015) and therefore currently one of the most visible.
SiFive's business model is indeed not to be a chip vendor, but to enable others to make chips.
At the moment. most of the RISC-V activity has been people (often individuals) making soft cores for FPGAs and large companies who are already making SoCs putting a RISC-V processor in on corner.
What a lot of people on this forum want is to be able to go to digikey/mouser/element14 and choose a microcontroller with a CPU (and they don't really care what CPU) and the selection of peripherals they need for some task.
Those doesn't exist now, but they will start to in 2019, from a number of vendors.
The first off the block appears to be NXP, with an SoC (RV32M1) with two RISC-V cores (not SiFive ones), two ARM cores, and a bunch of peripherals including BlueTooth, USB, ADC, RTC, uSDHC, crypto acceleration. They have a web site where you can get a board with this for free
http://open-isa.org/order/ and they gave away a few hundred boards at the RISC-V Summit last week.
MicroSemi/Microchip have announced a version of their PolarFire FPGA with embedded SiFive FU540 complex (five 64 bit cores, four with FPU&MMU).
There will be a *lot* more to follow during 2019.