How I can distinguish news discussing a processor core design (seemingly, usually, marketed as a "core") from that discussing hardware that I can actually buy (a processor "chip")?

I would have thought that 1. https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc... 2. https://greenwaves-technologies.com/ai_processor_gap8/ and 3. https://syntacore.com/page/products/processor-ip/scr1

would be pieces of hardware that I can buy. Instead, they seem to be designs for hardware which conform to the RISC-V ISA, which could then be fabbed by a semiconductor manufacturer or flashed onto an FPGA.

What marketing/technical terms distinguish the designs of these systems from their implementations? "Core", "processor", "MCU"/"microcontroller", for example? Are any/all of these uniquely constrained to describing either a design (on paper) or that design's physical implementation in hardware?