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Sorry if this sounds cringe, complete hardware novice here

> RISC-V IS THE ISA not the silicon

Doesn't that still require the chip-maker to build the chip with an interface that allows RISC-V instructions to run on it? It's not possible to "flash" a existing intel x86 CPU and run RISC-V instructions on it right?

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Yes. That is correct. The expectation is to run these on RISC-V hardware (mostly emulators are used now due to limited hardware availability but that is not the end goal).

* Technically it may be possible to run RISC-V on Intel/AMD CPUs by modifying the microcode but not that much is known about what exactly the microcode does and it will likely not be very performant.

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