This wasn't about arm in a high end laptop though, this is about underpowered cores in an soc probably meant for sbc applications barely managing out of order execution shoved into a laptop form factor.
I'm not against riscv on principle, in fact I quite like it. But let's not pretend it's performance is there yet for laptop-class devices.
Most SD cards aren't really suitable for the kind of workload an operating system generates (that being mostly random i/o). Make sure to get a reputable A2 (application class 2) rated card, they aren't that expensive but perform way better.
Raspberry Pi themselves launched a card recently, I haven't tried that one but it's probably a good choice too.