I think they mean that ARM became dominant by widely licencing its RISC architecture to pretty much anyone. This startup wants to make RISC V designs and licence them to various chip manufacturers - so they won’t be in the business of making chips themselves, just the design.

But as long as they are RISC V chips, then they would run the same software as any other RISC V chips.

Would that be a risk? Isn’t the whole point of RISC V that its ISA is open and free to use? That’s not the case for ARM or Intel’s x86 architecture.

In case you don’t already know about it, paccache (part of the pacman-contrib package) will let you easily remove old packages from the pacman cache