Chinese firms have been moving in that direction for some time now. One early adopter was GigaDevice, which started offering RISC-V versions of their microcontrollers (e.g. GD32VF103 - a RISC-V adapted STM32 clone) around 2019.
If you ignore the military ambitions of China and the fact they’re openly sharing technology with Russia, perhaps.
I don’t see anything but regret for Europe several decades from now if they decide to start providing China with the technical expertise they’re currently lacking in this space.
This is all about China trying to find a way to escape the pressure of sanctions from Europe and the US.
The EU has to start working more with China, for better or worse.
Not as friends or allies, but there aren't a lot of those left anyway. It's only rational in this multi polar world to have some level of engagement with all parties.
Most of the sanctions Europe have on China were just to please the US anyway.
"This is all about China trying to find a way to escape the pressure of sanctions from Europe and the US"
Is this supposed to be a nefarious Chinese activity?
I read the sentence as the US is the nefarious one, putting pressure between two groups to not work together. It’s only natural for China to act in its own self interest.
I've always thought of 'continental Europe' as meaning 'mainland Europe'. In other words excluding the disconnected parts like the UK. Regardless, the UK is in Europe.
The EU was established in 1993. Arm was founded in 1990.
For that matter the UK is composed of islands and parts thereof and nothing in "continental Europe", a term which refers to just the contiguous landmass. (Gibraltar is owned by the UK, but not part of it.)
Luckily Europe is not defined by the EU or sea levels, and the UK is very much in Europe the continent.
That may be in part to their 'president for life'. Leaders are not immortal though and transitions between them have seen large and sometimes catastrophic changes. China designed its modern political system to avoid that, only for Xi to undo it and purge younger potential challengers.
For life and is 71 in arguably the most stressful job in the world. The risk of mental decline cannot be ignored, particularly as he has now served longer than any US president in all of history.
Although I say that and then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find which individual had the longest tenure of presidency and vice presidency combined. It seems like it’s either Nixon, HW Bush, or Biden.
If not exactly hostile then definetly untrustworthy, they certainly show that they are willing to blackmail their partners. No one can be surprised that others want to get rid of influence over critical products. I strongly support it.
It's like with russian gas once again, even the root of the problem is the same.
One man with infinite power and no accountability for his actions.
Just for clarification. I don't blame Americans, but at least from my perspective, this electoral system is very radical and gives almost "absolute power" to a person or party that almost always has marginally more support. You do not need to compromise by creating coalitions etc.
In the end, it is the fault of us Europeans who blindly believed that any successful candidate would be in our favour and perceived as friendly. Although everyone understands how fragile elections are, this was naively ignored.
"right now" being the key phrase here. On what length of time due you judge stability? The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine. The question is if the institutions that produced USA can hold. China on the other hand lacks the self correcting mechanisms that USA has built in.
China has a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. The interesting thing is that many regions of the globe have a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. Europe had major continent-wide cataclysms with WW1/2 in the 1900s; the Wars of Religion in the early 1600s; and the Hundred Years War + Black Death + Mongol Conquests in the 1300s. The Holy Roman Empire lasted from about 900 AD to around 1300 AD. The Roman Republic lasted about 500 years; the Roman Empire lasted another 400-500.
I think the logic might be that China just had their civilization-ending cataclysm, and so they're on the upswing now. Ditto Europe. This is probably not the end of the United States either, more like the Crisis of the 3rd Century. But it's just as logical to look back on the 400-year cycle and think "Better invest in the countries that have already had their crisis and dealt with it than ones that are starting to decay internally" than to look back on the last 75 years and think "Wow, that was chaotic, the next 75 years will be equally chaotic."
> The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine.
Such an event is also one reason India got my grandparent's generation to leave.
And the one about 175 years ago in Ireland probably contributed to both the (eventual) Irish home rule movement and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
While the Great Leap Forward's famine was avoidable in theory, I think that the historical examples of so many others having similar experiences during the transition from agrarian to industrial, shows that in practice the mistakes are very easy to fall into.
Predictable to an extent. President Xi has effected a number of rather drastic changes internally; it's possible that external policy changes may follow.
Most authoritarian states are 'stable and predictable'. When you meet a lion on the savannah the beast is stable and predictable in that it will most likely try to eat you unless it isn't hungry. Step on a snake and the outcome is stable and predictable in that you will get bitten.
It is good for Europe to learn to stand on its - our - own legs, to become less dependent on the USA for territorial defence and probably also to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule. Si vis pacem, para bellum. It is not good for Europe to swap dependence on the USA with dependence on China, we're more than 500 million people with access to most of the resources we need to stand on our own legs so let's get crackin'.
Also, let's drop the silly panic around Trump, the man is doing what he was elected to do which is put America first. We should do the same, in a serious way. Not in an isolationist way but sensibly. Stop importing the world's problems, stop with the silly self-chastisement around 'climate' and 'colonialism', stop the import of islamism and make serious work of getting rid of the islamist factions which have been allowed to establish themselves or Europe as it once was - the birthplace of the enlightenment - will succumb to the sectarian infighting which destroyed Lebanon after they invited Arafat and his PLO.
So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
[1] Fascism and Communism are closely related so it is not that odd to call the current government form in China by the former name even if they claim to be the latter. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism for a definition or read what Mussolini had to say about the subject and you'll see the parallels.
You're going well off-topic here and into inflammatory territory. This whole debate should probably best happen somewhere else.
But just one thing: while I personally share your take on the political and societal issues, I do think it's unfortunate that you lump "climate" in there, in scare quotes. The climate issue is informed by hard science. America's tendency to politicize everything will have terrible outcomes if climate gets completely caught up in the culture war. Whatever we think about the solutions, we have to find a way to agree that this particular problem is bad and needs to be addressed urgently.
Still, again, here is not the best place for this whole discussion.
For secular and democratic nations, multiculturalism isn’t inherently dangerous if there are principles and ideals around which newcomers to any nation can assimilate and integrate. America attempted that to some degree of success with its melting pot ideals till the 90s, but there wasn’t enough emphasis on civic duty, from either the commoners or the elite. The US founding fathers included everyone in their vision, btw, including Muslims. The failure in any integration and assimilation goals from the past few decades result from enabling unjust narratives which pose America as the only country with the social ills and issues it’s being criticized of, when there isn’t any other country in recent memory with a more socially diverse congress.
> It is good for Europe ... to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule
I don't know if you're being serious here, but this (Ameri-centric? C21-centric?) view is laughable. Europe is well-acquainted with war and never saw lasting peace for much of it's history until the second half of the 20th century.
> Europe ... saw lasting peace [in] the second half of the 20th century.
Which happens to coincide with the lifetime of the majority of Europeans. War was mostly something which happened to other countries, in other places - not in 'civilised' Europe, surely?
So yes, I am being serious - deadly serious. Most European countries neglected national defence after the fall of the Soviet Union in the expectation that Fukuyama was right when he claimed we were at 'The end of History' [1]. There is a good Swedish term for this condition: fredsskadad which translates to 'peace-damaged', the opposite of 'war-damaged'. It is the condition of a people who have gotten so used to peace being the norm that they assume that everyone everywhere else also considers peace to be the goal and thus no longer need to consider the possibility of ending up in a conflict.
Yup, relying on sadistic, communistic regime that puts people into concentration camps is a great idea! What can go wrong!? For instance trading with Russia, Nord Stream, didn't have any bad results...
Oh, crap, no, we have some full scale war going on in Europe now, because Putin thought he keeps Europe on the gas & oil leash (and he was almost right).
Because RISC V results would be something the Europeans could produce?
We are reliant on the US as only 2 companies can make the x86/64 chips. I don't think Europe would be completely against working with a US or Chinese company like Hi Five/Star Five, as long as we weren't dependent on them, and could pull ties if they abused their position of control.
ARM is owned by SoftBank, and you need to deal with them for licensing. While SoftBank is not based in the US, the amount they have invested in the US and US based companies means they are very coupled with US. Investing in ARM technology would have a stronger coupling than investing in RISC V.
This wouldn’t be true if Europe was more willing to abandon international copyright laws, but given the amount of IP they own they are unlikely to.
STmicro is producing chips at around 14-18nm. ASML is the one producing the leading lithography machine, and we are not talking about ARM, Infineon or NXP. Europe has the capacity to produce their own processors if needed.
Isn't the supplier of lithography machines for TSMC Dutch?
While that's not the entire process, and it would be a 20 year endeavour, it seems like funding the development of local capability here would be eminently doable.
Europe is also the current heavy hitter for fundamental physics research, so attracting talent and maintaining an ecosystem should be much more achievable.
Most of the machines for the rest of the process also come out of Europe. Building the factories wouldn't be all that hard. Actually developing and running a full production sub-10nm process is a different beast entirely.
Manufacturing the processor itself is different issue from what architecture that processor will be. If Europe produces any consumer processors like that it wont be x86. It will be Risc-V (maybe arm? its UK but owned by Softbank so nope)
Just because SoftBank own it now, do you really think if Europe went to it and said "can we buy half, if so we'll buy $X amount of licences otherwise we'll start (effectively) a serious competitor in risc-v.
Because if the US are aligning with Russia and shunning Europe, then it makes sense for Europe to partner with China and break them off from Russia/USA
While it's important to steer clear of political debates, it's also crucial to acknowledge that the European Union, like any other political entity, has its strengths and weaknesses.
Well. I have worked quite a bit with Chinese businesses and let's just put like this: It does not matter much whatever license you think the SW or HW has. Whatever is available will be used and modified to the liking of the customer.
It is common for new employees to walk in with code bases of previous projects they have worked with and there is a great deal of administration involved in ensuring that no one else gets to work with more code than they absolutely need. Local builds and copying binary archives is common practice!
I hate to break it to you but it’s extremely common for Western employees to do the same. I had to investigate what seemed like a new employee attempting to begin an exfil of our source code only to discover what looked like all of EMC’s core code, the new employee’s last employer, in a gdrive folder.
> It does not matter much whatever license you think the SW or HW has. Whatever is available will be used and modified to the liking of the customer.
yeah, china is just not playing the stupid licensing and copyright game. chinese companies infringe trademarks and break licenses all the time. doing so boosts their business/economy overall so the state just doesn't bother with enforcing anything.
the annoying thing is that we're not really playing the game either, or at least, we have laws that get enforced "randomly". it was recent news that meta torrented some 80 terabytes of stuff (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...) and essentially nothing happened. back in the day aaron schwartz was driven to suicide over a way smaller chunk of scientific papers downloaded.
The US and the Soviets were able to cooperate on space missions in spite of their enmity. It's not unreasonable to think that Europe could work with China on a scientific mission, even if the EU or its member states want to keep China at arms-length otherwise. There's an interesting moral quandary there, as to whether cooperation with a totalitarian regime helps diminish or consolidate the regime's power, but this daylight savings thing here in the US is throwing me for a loop so I'm going to have to leave that unanswered for now.
There's an interesting moral quandary there, as to whether cooperation with a totalitarian regime helps diminish or consolidate the regime's power, but this daylight savings thing here in the US is throwing me for a loop so I'm going to have to leave that unanswered for now.
To be honest (I say this as an European), we have tougher nuts to crack the worrying whether cooperation with China will diminish or consolidate it's power. Our focus is now on defending peace and democracy in Europe (and on a larger scale non-US NATO). To say that China has its issues is an understatement (everyone has), but they are too far away to be a threat short- to midterm. Plus China also values international trade stability. So it would be silly not to look where we can (cautiously) cooperate.
Ideally we would like to continue to work with the US. But the US is less interested in Europe now and that creates a vacuum that will lead to new trade alliances.
It is what it is, IF the USA is now europe's enemy, and aligning with Russia (cutting off ukraine from satellites, disabling F16s, hummilaiting the leader in press confrences, calling him a dictator in the press and JD calling us "random countries that haven't fought a war in 30 years" are all indicating that's true).
We will forced to look for other friends, I'm not sure we have the luxury of complete ideological alignment, instead a pragmatic but considered strategic approach shall have to do. I for one think we've bigger fish to fry, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" and all that.
Simple: China is only totalitarian in western propaganda. "Yellow Peril" is a tired trope, it's a democracy. It's difficult to characterize the U.S. as a democracy, and our social progress is rolling backwards.
I'm very impressed and fascinated by the Chinese society and their progress. I love the country and it's rich history. But is it a democracy? No not according to my idea of what that word means.
It's a great country nonetheless, people are free in China, they have their own system and it works for them, good! Why pretend it's a democracy?
The Chinese would say the point of democracy is to translate the will of the people into action, it's to efficiently solve problems that people have, it's in their understanding neither liberal nor representative. In fact they'd likely turn your question around, if democracy is merely a set of procedures or rituals without concerns for the will of the majority, the demos which is in the name, why do you pretend to be one?
Criticize to what end? Overturning the entire order? Questioning the legitimacy of the state? That is not allowed. But the ideological diversity within the CPC is broader than US Democrats and Republicans combined. And if you actually had a chance to challenge the real legitimacy of the US state, you would quickly find all your rights disappearing as well. No state actually tolerates that. The US just allows a facade of 'discourse'.
There's currently a deep crisis of legitimacy in Western democracy so brushing off criticism as hogwash seems to me pretty ignorant.
The core of democracy cannot be, in the words of the current American president, to be "good television". If all your democracy does is exhaust itself in staging content for social media, television and election campaigns you have inverted what the point of it is. People don't need governments so bad that ridicule becomes a daily norm, they need it to solve material problems and put food on the table. Anything else is simply decadence.
At UN votes when voting about Ruzzian invasion China abstain while USA voted with Ruzzia and other most despicable dictatorships. Still waiting for a MAGA explain this 5D chess move and explain what the USA citizen won from this.
"MAGA" voted in the manchurian candidate. Dismantling oversight, accountability, throwing out old alliances and siding with the global aggressors. The US government is rapidly turning into a kleptocracy.
I mean a negotiated peace. The alternative is a drawn out conflict that either wipes out Ukraine’s male population or significantly weakens the economies of Europe and America or both. Avoiding those things is taking the side of Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans. Does it mean a dictator (Putin) gets some land? Sure. But I don’t think that’s the reason to seek peace.
This kind of reasoning made sense before the 1938 Munich agreements.
By now, we have to assume that giving a dictator a victory will only fuel his next campaign. Especially since it's a campaign for which Russia has been preparing for 70+ years – including exercises shortly before the latest invasion of Ukraine.
If it's Georgescu you're referring to (because you don't seem to want to say so): the annulment was upheld by the ECHR.
We cannot tolerate democracy threatening extremism any longer, nor Russian interference. If anything, the EU is too soft. Orban, and to a lesser degree Fico, are a disgrace, also to their own population.
Xi is not all powerful; no one person is. The state is powerful, not an individual. And all states are ultimately authoritarian. The only question is what form and to what end.
Is there “good” dictatorships?
My personal opinion is there is no good dictator (ok, in HN context, BDFL in a SW project)
I like no totalitarian regime. No one.
A benevolent dictator is the best form of government. Unfortunately though power corrupts and they have a habit of becoming self serving, and very much not benevolent.
I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach.
Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-locked congresses) which preport to "represent the people" but just turn into "nothing gets done" factories.
So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done.
The analogy between projects/companies and governments is missing big components though.
- "Benevolent Dictators" of companies or projects have to obey the law
- They can't forbid competition or alternatives
- Every participant can leave at any time
- If they burn the organization to the ground, the worst case scenario is the organization get replaced and people move on
I think it shows that we're using the word "dictator" way too casually in that case.
> So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done. There are also obviously bad dictatorships.
All dictatorships, by definition, are better at getting things done than organizations that require non-unilateral assent.
Instead, the difference between a good dictatorship and a bad dictatorship is that in a good dictatorship, dissidents are eliminated quietly or, if not quietly, then with enough spin that everyone considers their elimination to be a good thing.
In other words, what good dictatorships are good at is PR.
Also you can look at the history of the Nazis and it becomes apparent that they weren't good at much of anything except that: so successfully that "efficient Nazis" became a trope for decades after the war despite all the evidence lying around to the contrary.
How is a dictatorship different from a monarchy? There have been plenty of good monarchies throughout history. Frederick The Great, created the Prussian State. Stuart’s were well loved that they ended parliamentary democracy to restore the Stuarts. Victorian, Elizabethan era were also prosperous and well known. Ceasar was the final monarch who united the enmity between the nobles and plebs.
The problem is we look at those states and all we see is the existence of slavery (that existed in all societies till at least 1800AD), women being relegated to a different social role etc. But it is wrong to assume that any of those were due to monarchy and that a monarchy in the modern age would not rule based on modern values. Just look at Singapore, for a small example of a monarchy ruling based on current social mores. Unfortunately since WW1, monarchies throughout the world have vanished, and all we have are liberal democracies, so we can’t say either way.
I'm going to assume that you're speaking of monarchies in which the monarch is the actual ruler, rather than UK, Belgium, the Netherlands or Canada for instance, right?
In that case, I'd say that a monarchy is essentially dictatorship + a (usually) clear line of succession.
If we want this to go anywhere, not just super computing, the first step is to get devices, useful devices, in the hands of enthusiast. That means funding projects similar to the Raspberry Pi, but for RISC-V, and perhaps mini-itx boards.
We need these cheap-ish computers in the hands of people who will port software to the platform. Without a good selection of ready to go software, the hardware is pretty irrelevant.
No it's not. For HPC good software support for the vector extension is basically everything that matters, and the framework main board doesn't support that extension.
I would currently recommend the BananaPI BPI-F3 or the OrangePI RV2 for that purpose, as they both have the same SpacemiT X60 cores, which support the vector extension.
Sadly there are currently only in-order cores with RVV support available. Getting a cheap out-of-order implementation is the next most important thing for improving software support.
Thank you! I've been waiting for a viable RVV board for a long time. Just ordered the OrangePi RV2.
This unblocks me properly working to optimize for vector support in software. OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
Yes, I know I could use qemu, but it's not the same. I feel like this is what unblocks me on the software side.
> OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
The problem is that there are some things in RVV where it's unclear how they will perform on high perf OoO cores:
* general choice of LMUL: on in-order cores it's clear that maximizing LMUL without spilling is the best approach, for OoO this isn't clear.
* How will LMUL>1 vrgather and vcompress perform?
* How high is the impact of vsetvli instructions? Is it worth trying to move them outside of loops whenever possible, or is the impact minimal like in the current in-order implementations.
* What is the overhead of using .vx instruction variants, is there additional cost involved in moving between GPRs and vector registers?
* Is there additional overhead when reinterpreting vector masks?
* What performance can we expect from the more complex load/stores, especially the segmented ones.
I'm almost certain that this is exactly how it works in processor design. You start building your compiler before the processor is finished, and test it with the emulator.
At least, in quantum computing, that's how it works.
So from these resources it seems like they develop a vector processor with Semidynamics out-of-order Atrevido core as a scalar core and their Vitruvius VPU.
In the more recent report they have a vector length of 16,384 bits, with 16 lanes (8 in FPGA, 16 in the diagram, final version could be more), so total of 16*64=1024 bits of ALUs.
Slide 15 seems to indicate that they want to create a chip with 32 of those cores, a shared L3 cache, and access to HBM.
- Who Owns it (Japan)
- Where is it headquartered (Cambridge)
- Where is most of the IP produced (Cambridge mostly, but the remainder is in the US)
So if we care about being fast, surely the most expedient way, complete with guaranteed success, is to simply buy out softbank and then bring any IP development that's been offshored to the US back to Europe?
There's nothing to celebrate here. This is another sad moment for Europeans everywhere.
> The first phase of this six-year endeavor is backed by €240 million (£200 million, $260 million) in funding.
For this to be a serious effort it would take another two zeros at the end of that number. This is 100x too small.
In 6 years, we'll have spent a pittance, to realize that we got basically nothing for it, and we're even further behind the US whose companies are spending tens of billions to develop new accelerators.
Let's take one US company at random, Groq, they've raised 10x this amount of money. That's one startup. Never mind Cerebras, SambaNova, Tenstorrent, etc. How is this effort going to compete? And they're giving the money to "38 leading partners" instead of one focused entity. It won't compete. It's just a waste.
The EU is still thinking too small. In an era where the US is no longer a reliable partner (maybe even a rival), and where Taiwan could disappear overnight, this is extremely stupid and dangerous.
I don't understand why the EU can't get serious about tech. Why does every investment need to be peanuts? Why can't we pay people well so they don't all leave to the US/Canada? Why can't we seriously invest in startups?
Who in Europe would fund something bigger? Governments are tight on money and in many countries a aging population is overwhelming the welfare state while at the same time defense spending must go up dramatically and yesterday.
Private investors in Europe don't have the very deep pockets of US tech investors and there is much less of a culture of risk taking in investing in Europe on top of that
Edit: to be clear, I agree with your general point.
Speculation is that most of these EU funding efforts aren't for producing viable competitors but industry subsidry - jobs programs with a dash of embezzling.
Maybe someone from Europe could weigh in? I'm probably wrong, if the funding is transparent it should be easy to confirm or deny.
You make a point. However, I'm not sure how it'd be possible.
The US has been funded by an insane level of debt for the last 60+ years. Debt that might come calling quite soon, according to Donald Trump's own treasure secretary, iirc, and might even be the reason for all the current apparent international Trump-craziness (well, Trump being a narcissist certainly doesn't help).
While the EU has serious debt, if I understand correctly, that's several orders of magnitude smaller when compared to GNP, which limits the ability of the EU to invest.
(Jumping to assume what the original commenter meant:)
China is pushing RISC V aggressively, and might be a lot more likely to succeed in making competitively powerful cores than €240M pounds spent in Europe, where money won’t go nearly as far.
I imagine one of the biggest constraints on success here is just expertise. If Apple’s hardware team, or Qualcomm’s Oryon team were tasked with making a high performance RISC V CPU, I’m sure they could crank out something incredible pretty quick. But I have a feeling practical expertise on this sort of cutting edge hardware design is a rare thing. Frankly no idea how this human capital compares between Europe and China, but I’ll be excited to see progress and genuine competition on open architectures like this
I work in this space and I would say it's pretty even between Europe (the UK in particular, but also other countries like the Netherlands and France) and China.
> where money won’t go nearly as far
I'm not sure about this either - apparently high tech salaries in China are not out of line with Europe (both are way less than America).
But China does have more enormous companies that can fund their own chips (e.g. ByteDance).
The current crop of cores were designed several years ago before some key standards were adopted. They exist mostly to experiment and allow early adopters to develop software.
Next generation cores from companies like Ventana claim very high performance (we’ll see what PPW ends up being). Tenstorrent has already started talking about an extremely wide core to follow their already 8-wide designs. Qualcomm seems quite interested in the idea of moving from ARM to RISCV and there are other companies working on big stuff, but it takes 4-5 years and the final pieces of the puzzle only fell into place a couple years ago, so the designs are all in progress.
This is exactly correct. There is a long walk between working ISA and a high performance device that can sustain high IPC. Alibaba has the C930 now, only a few day ago. There are no credible performance figures on it yet, but they've made fast server grade ARMs, so they know how to build high performance CPUs. Then, as you say, there is Tenstorrent and Keller.
Can "Europe" achieve anything here? Anything is possible, I suppose... But given the players already at it, Europe is already way behind the curve.
Depending on who's involved in the design of the processors, they don't have to relearn anything. Hire the people who made efficient ARM processors to develop efficient RISC-V processors using comparable techniques. This will increase costs for quality chips (those engineers can probably command a very high compensation package), but substantially reduces the time to market for competitive hardware.
ARM just announced they are manufacturing their own chips for the first time further threatening their customers (despite testifying the exact opposite in court a couple months ago).
Since SoftBank took over, their company has shifted and proved that when a standard is controlled by one company, there will eventually be issues.
Switching to RISC means those issues won’t ever happen again.
Choosing RISC-V here is more about how much soverienty a country has over the IP than anything else here. The US can probably consider most-all ARM IP to be dual use technology and immediately deny use of it.
RISC-V being based out of Switzerland, the ISA being under a permissive Creative Commons license, and most software tools being FOSS is definitely why it's being adopted here. It's completely isolated from all geopolitics.
“Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a Japanese-owned British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England”
The USA pressures Japan to stop selling licences to European Fabs? Why, what would push them to such extremes?
Fabs can still produce those current designs (they just don't have licences). Now Europe can buy SoftBank out, or Britain can just walk into ARM Cambridge and say it's been sequested for the war effort.
Given ARM is mostly an IP bsaed company that wouldn't really work. For reference just look at what happened with ARM's china susidiary with which this basically happened.
ARM China is a sales office. Not the same thing at all.
If a design is made in a British office of a British company, 'by hook or by crook' the state can gain access to it. That's the hard, perhaps slightly uncomfortable truth.
Of course it would only ever come to this if softbank refused to sell and there was some national security angle.
If ARM want to close their office here, then the state can hire all their engineers and offer immunity/void on any NDA they've signed with ARM, if anything that's actually the most desirable outcome.
Again we're talking about things that simply aren't going to happen, and if they do there are much much bigger problems.
ARM Holdings is British. Anyone making ARM cores (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon’s Graviton…) is paying licensing fees to a British company.
Arm even tried to cancel Qualcomm’s licensing agreement back in the fall. Using RISC V entirely circumvents not only royalty payments, but legal battles like that (frivolous or not).
I'm all in for RISC-V, but ARM Holdings is British (and owned by the Japanese SoftBank group). ASML is in the The Netherlands. And there are some European ARM CPU vendors (NXP, ST Microelectronics, etc.). So Europe could also standardize on ARM without sovereignty issues?
I think we should definitely invest in RISC-V, open is preferable, especially in a continent-wide initiative. I’m just contesting that the US could unilaterally sabotage ARM use in Europe.
When making sophisticated big projects, usually weighting many considerations, not just architecture.
Even more, some considerations could have more weight then architecture for particular case.
Examples are good compiler/libs/frameworks, some specific software, good support, experience on similar contracts, big number of professionals with military clearance.
That's why some long time IBM won most govt contracts on supercomputers.
But once IBM decided, govt is not interest enough client and after that moment, most contracts won by Intel.
It is not for the rest of the world who are banned from using advanced US technology so best for the world is for China to get to parity on node size as well as rest of the world to adopt RISC-V.
The EU is better off trying to build a local capability, riscv is the best bet as you dont need an architecture/ISA license or dependencies on geopolitics
RISC-V is probably no different than ARM at it's core. Also, both of them are RISC ISAs.
Right now, you are far more likely to use RISC-V and not know it than to knowingly interact with RISC-V directly. For example, since about 2015, Nvidia has used RISC-V as an onboard controller for their GPUs.
Western Digital also announced they were looking (have already?) to move to RISC-V.
If you manufacture items at scale, getting away from ARM licensing costs per unit makes financial sense. Especially if you already have in-house expertise who can design chips tuned to your specific requirements.
Both ARM and RISC-V are Reduced Instruction Set Compute (RISC) instead of Complex Instruction Set Compute (CISC aka x86) architectures. So it's more about the tooling that makes one better than the other. And like all open source, the tooling will be better over time as people and organizations recognize they get more back out of contributing to open systems.
That's way too optimistic. If it's like "all open source," it will have some improvements, forks and then nothing. There are only so many people who can contribute to chip development, and they all have jobs.
I'm not native English speaker but I think that the current and near situation in local Carrefour would be influenced by “abandoned” rather than “abandoning”.
Depends on what criteria you use for "better". ARM is surely more advanced technologically, but RISC-V may be a more future-proof decision as you're not necessarily tied in to one company that may change their licensing costs in the future.
China recently moved that direction. That would be nice collaboration to see between EU and China.
China to publish policy to boost RISC-V chip use nationwide, sources say https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-publish-policy-boos...
Chinese firms have been moving in that direction for some time now. One early adopter was GigaDevice, which started offering RISC-V versions of their microcontrollers (e.g. GD32VF103 - a RISC-V adapted STM32 clone) around 2019.
If you ignore the military ambitions of China and the fact they’re openly sharing technology with Russia, perhaps.
I don’t see anything but regret for Europe several decades from now if they decide to start providing China with the technical expertise they’re currently lacking in this space.
This is all about China trying to find a way to escape the pressure of sanctions from Europe and the US.
The EU has to start working more with China, for better or worse.
Not as friends or allies, but there aren't a lot of those left anyway. It's only rational in this multi polar world to have some level of engagement with all parties.
Most of the sanctions Europe have on China were just to please the US anyway.
"This is all about China trying to find a way to escape the pressure of sanctions from Europe and the US" Is this supposed to be a nefarious Chinese activity?
I read the sentence as the US is the nefarious one, putting pressure between two groups to not work together. It’s only natural for China to act in its own self interest.
The EU needs to build arms to defend itself that the US can't interfere with and knows less about, and so does China.
Didn't ARM start in Europe?
in uk, so in continental europe, yes.
I've always thought of 'continental Europe' as meaning 'mainland Europe'. In other words excluding the disconnected parts like the UK. Regardless, the UK is in Europe.
I think you're right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe
It was in the EU when ARM started as well, fwiw.
The EU was established in 1993. Arm was founded in 1990.
For that matter the UK is composed of islands and parts thereof and nothing in "continental Europe", a term which refers to just the contiguous landmass. (Gibraltar is owned by the UK, but not part of it.)
Luckily Europe is not defined by the EU or sea levels, and the UK is very much in Europe the continent.
Being slightly pedantic, Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory on continental Europe.
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I think it'd be nice for collaboration across all nations that want to take part.
If the goal is to decouple from the U.S., why would the EU want to collaborate with a totalitarian state like China?
The US is extremely chaotic and unpredictable. China is fairly stable and predictable.
This is it. China might be authoritarian, but it's acting way less eratic than the US right now.
That may be in part to their 'president for life'. Leaders are not immortal though and transitions between them have seen large and sometimes catastrophic changes. China designed its modern political system to avoid that, only for Xi to undo it and purge younger potential challengers.
For life and is 71 in arguably the most stressful job in the world. The risk of mental decline cannot be ignored, particularly as he has now served longer than any US president in all of history.
Although I say that and then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find which individual had the longest tenure of presidency and vice presidency combined. It seems like it’s either Nixon, HW Bush, or Biden.
The US is not just erratic, it wouldn't be a stretch to call them hostile towards the EU right now.
If not exactly hostile then definetly untrustworthy, they certainly show that they are willing to blackmail their partners. No one can be surprised that others want to get rid of influence over critical products. I strongly support it.
It's like with russian gas once again, even the root of the problem is the same. One man with infinite power and no accountability for his actions.
Just for clarification. I don't blame Americans, but at least from my perspective, this electoral system is very radical and gives almost "absolute power" to a person or party that almost always has marginally more support. You do not need to compromise by creating coalitions etc.
In the end, it is the fault of us Europeans who blindly believed that any successful candidate would be in our favour and perceived as friendly. Although everyone understands how fragile elections are, this was naively ignored.
"right now" being the key phrase here. On what length of time due you judge stability? The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine. The question is if the institutions that produced USA can hold. China on the other hand lacks the self correcting mechanisms that USA has built in.
China has a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. The interesting thing is that many regions of the globe have a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. Europe had major continent-wide cataclysms with WW1/2 in the 1900s; the Wars of Religion in the early 1600s; and the Hundred Years War + Black Death + Mongol Conquests in the 1300s. The Holy Roman Empire lasted from about 900 AD to around 1300 AD. The Roman Republic lasted about 500 years; the Roman Empire lasted another 400-500.
I think the logic might be that China just had their civilization-ending cataclysm, and so they're on the upswing now. Ditto Europe. This is probably not the end of the United States either, more like the Crisis of the 3rd Century. But it's just as logical to look back on the 400-year cycle and think "Better invest in the countries that have already had their crisis and dealt with it than ones that are starting to decay internally" than to look back on the last 75 years and think "Wow, that was chaotic, the next 75 years will be equally chaotic."
> The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine.
Such an event is also one reason India got my grandparent's generation to leave.
And the one about 175 years ago in Ireland probably contributed to both the (eventual) Irish home rule movement and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
While the Great Leap Forward's famine was avoidable in theory, I think that the historical examples of so many others having similar experiences during the transition from agrarian to industrial, shows that in practice the mistakes are very easy to fall into.
> they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine
... and they learned nothing from it.
Predictable to an extent. President Xi has effected a number of rather drastic changes internally; it's possible that external policy changes may follow.
It's not as crazy as electing Trump, of course.
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Most authoritarian states are 'stable and predictable'. When you meet a lion on the savannah the beast is stable and predictable in that it will most likely try to eat you unless it isn't hungry. Step on a snake and the outcome is stable and predictable in that you will get bitten.
It is good for Europe to learn to stand on its - our - own legs, to become less dependent on the USA for territorial defence and probably also to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule. Si vis pacem, para bellum. It is not good for Europe to swap dependence on the USA with dependence on China, we're more than 500 million people with access to most of the resources we need to stand on our own legs so let's get crackin'.
Also, let's drop the silly panic around Trump, the man is doing what he was elected to do which is put America first. We should do the same, in a serious way. Not in an isolationist way but sensibly. Stop importing the world's problems, stop with the silly self-chastisement around 'climate' and 'colonialism', stop the import of islamism and make serious work of getting rid of the islamist factions which have been allowed to establish themselves or Europe as it once was - the birthplace of the enlightenment - will succumb to the sectarian infighting which destroyed Lebanon after they invited Arafat and his PLO.
So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
[1] Fascism and Communism are closely related so it is not that odd to call the current government form in China by the former name even if they claim to be the latter. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism for a definition or read what Mussolini had to say about the subject and you'll see the parallels.
You're going well off-topic here and into inflammatory territory. This whole debate should probably best happen somewhere else.
But just one thing: while I personally share your take on the political and societal issues, I do think it's unfortunate that you lump "climate" in there, in scare quotes. The climate issue is informed by hard science. America's tendency to politicize everything will have terrible outcomes if climate gets completely caught up in the culture war. Whatever we think about the solutions, we have to find a way to agree that this particular problem is bad and needs to be addressed urgently.
Still, again, here is not the best place for this whole discussion.
For secular and democratic nations, multiculturalism isn’t inherently dangerous if there are principles and ideals around which newcomers to any nation can assimilate and integrate. America attempted that to some degree of success with its melting pot ideals till the 90s, but there wasn’t enough emphasis on civic duty, from either the commoners or the elite. The US founding fathers included everyone in their vision, btw, including Muslims. The failure in any integration and assimilation goals from the past few decades result from enabling unjust narratives which pose America as the only country with the social ills and issues it’s being criticized of, when there isn’t any other country in recent memory with a more socially diverse congress.
> The US founding fathers included everyone in their vision, btw
Of course many were only 3/5th included. And half the population weren’t included at all.
> It is good for Europe ... to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule
I don't know if you're being serious here, but this (Ameri-centric? C21-centric?) view is laughable. Europe is well-acquainted with war and never saw lasting peace for much of it's history until the second half of the 20th century.
> Europe ... saw lasting peace [in] the second half of the 20th century.
Which happens to coincide with the lifetime of the majority of Europeans. War was mostly something which happened to other countries, in other places - not in 'civilised' Europe, surely?
So yes, I am being serious - deadly serious. Most European countries neglected national defence after the fall of the Soviet Union in the expectation that Fukuyama was right when he claimed we were at 'The end of History' [1]. There is a good Swedish term for this condition: fredsskadad which translates to 'peace-damaged', the opposite of 'war-damaged'. It is the condition of a people who have gotten so used to peace being the norm that they assume that everyone everywhere else also considers peace to be the goal and thus no longer need to consider the possibility of ending up in a conflict.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57981.The_End_of_History...
Yup, relying on sadistic, communistic regime that puts people into concentration camps is a great idea! What can go wrong!? For instance trading with Russia, Nord Stream, didn't have any bad results...
Oh, crap, no, we have some full scale war going on in Europe now, because Putin thought he keeps Europe on the gas & oil leash (and he was almost right).
Authoritarian stable regime in the east, or authoritarian and erratic regime in the west. I know which one I'd prefer, long term.
Because RISC V results would be something the Europeans could produce?
We are reliant on the US as only 2 companies can make the x86/64 chips. I don't think Europe would be completely against working with a US or Chinese company like Hi Five/Star Five, as long as we weren't dependent on them, and could pull ties if they abused their position of control.
> We are reliant on the US as only 2 companies can make the x86/64 chips.
The x86-64 architecture is on its way out globally thanks to Arm. RISC V is not needed for decoupling from the US.
ARM is owned by SoftBank, and you need to deal with them for licensing. While SoftBank is not based in the US, the amount they have invested in the US and US based companies means they are very coupled with US. Investing in ARM technology would have a stronger coupling than investing in RISC V.
This wouldn’t be true if Europe was more willing to abandon international copyright laws, but given the amount of IP they own they are unlikely to.
STmicro is producing chips at around 14-18nm. ASML is the one producing the leading lithography machine, and we are not talking about ARM, Infineon or NXP. Europe has the capacity to produce their own processors if needed.
Isn't the supplier of lithography machines for TSMC Dutch?
While that's not the entire process, and it would be a 20 year endeavour, it seems like funding the development of local capability here would be eminently doable.
Europe is also the current heavy hitter for fundamental physics research, so attracting talent and maintaining an ecosystem should be much more achievable.
Most of the machines for the rest of the process also come out of Europe. Building the factories wouldn't be all that hard. Actually developing and running a full production sub-10nm process is a different beast entirely.
Manufacturing the processor itself is different issue from what architecture that processor will be. If Europe produces any consumer processors like that it wont be x86. It will be Risc-V (maybe arm? its UK but owned by Softbank so nope)
Just because SoftBank own it now, do you really think if Europe went to it and said "can we buy half, if so we'll buy $X amount of licences otherwise we'll start (effectively) a serious competitor in risc-v.
Because if the US are aligning with Russia and shunning Europe, then it makes sense for Europe to partner with China and break them off from Russia/USA
While it's important to steer clear of political debates, it's also crucial to acknowledge that the European Union, like any other political entity, has its strengths and weaknesses.
If it’s open source it doesn’t matter who the state they’re collaborating with is.
Well. I have worked quite a bit with Chinese businesses and let's just put like this: It does not matter much whatever license you think the SW or HW has. Whatever is available will be used and modified to the liking of the customer.
It is common for new employees to walk in with code bases of previous projects they have worked with and there is a great deal of administration involved in ensuring that no one else gets to work with more code than they absolutely need. Local builds and copying binary archives is common practice!
I hate to break it to you but it’s extremely common for Western employees to do the same. I had to investigate what seemed like a new employee attempting to begin an exfil of our source code only to discover what looked like all of EMC’s core code, the new employee’s last employer, in a gdrive folder.
Incredibly common.
> It does not matter much whatever license you think the SW or HW has. Whatever is available will be used and modified to the liking of the customer.
yeah, china is just not playing the stupid licensing and copyright game. chinese companies infringe trademarks and break licenses all the time. doing so boosts their business/economy overall so the state just doesn't bother with enforcing anything.
the annoying thing is that we're not really playing the game either, or at least, we have laws that get enforced "randomly". it was recent news that meta torrented some 80 terabytes of stuff (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...) and essentially nothing happened. back in the day aaron schwartz was driven to suicide over a way smaller chunk of scientific papers downloaded.
Bourgeois dictatorship vs leninist party state
EU is friends with totalitarian states like Bahrain,Syria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.What's wrong with working with another totalitarian state ?
The US and the Soviets were able to cooperate on space missions in spite of their enmity. It's not unreasonable to think that Europe could work with China on a scientific mission, even if the EU or its member states want to keep China at arms-length otherwise. There's an interesting moral quandary there, as to whether cooperation with a totalitarian regime helps diminish or consolidate the regime's power, but this daylight savings thing here in the US is throwing me for a loop so I'm going to have to leave that unanswered for now.
There's an interesting moral quandary there, as to whether cooperation with a totalitarian regime helps diminish or consolidate the regime's power, but this daylight savings thing here in the US is throwing me for a loop so I'm going to have to leave that unanswered for now.
To be honest (I say this as an European), we have tougher nuts to crack the worrying whether cooperation with China will diminish or consolidate it's power. Our focus is now on defending peace and democracy in Europe (and on a larger scale non-US NATO). To say that China has its issues is an understatement (everyone has), but they are too far away to be a threat short- to midterm. Plus China also values international trade stability. So it would be silly not to look where we can (cautiously) cooperate.
Ideally we would like to continue to work with the US. But the US is less interested in Europe now and that creates a vacuum that will lead to new trade alliances.
It is what it is, IF the USA is now europe's enemy, and aligning with Russia (cutting off ukraine from satellites, disabling F16s, hummilaiting the leader in press confrences, calling him a dictator in the press and JD calling us "random countries that haven't fought a war in 30 years" are all indicating that's true). We will forced to look for other friends, I'm not sure we have the luxury of complete ideological alignment, instead a pragmatic but considered strategic approach shall have to do. I for one think we've bigger fish to fry, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" and all that.
At this point, I'd rather my country collaborates with China than the US. And I dislike China's government as much as the next person.
Simple: China is only totalitarian in western propaganda. "Yellow Peril" is a tired trope, it's a democracy. It's difficult to characterize the U.S. as a democracy, and our social progress is rolling backwards.
I'm very impressed and fascinated by the Chinese society and their progress. I love the country and it's rich history. But is it a democracy? No not according to my idea of what that word means.
It's a great country nonetheless, people are free in China, they have their own system and it works for them, good! Why pretend it's a democracy?
It's worth debating because China describes itself as such: http://en.moj.gov.cn/2024-03/05/c_967573.htm
The Chinese would say the point of democracy is to translate the will of the people into action, it's to efficiently solve problems that people have, it's in their understanding neither liberal nor representative. In fact they'd likely turn your question around, if democracy is merely a set of procedures or rituals without concerns for the will of the majority, the demos which is in the name, why do you pretend to be one?
What absolute hogwash.
Can you criticize and ridicule your government? No? Not a democracy.
Criticize to what end? Overturning the entire order? Questioning the legitimacy of the state? That is not allowed. But the ideological diversity within the CPC is broader than US Democrats and Republicans combined. And if you actually had a chance to challenge the real legitimacy of the US state, you would quickly find all your rights disappearing as well. No state actually tolerates that. The US just allows a facade of 'discourse'.
There's currently a deep crisis of legitimacy in Western democracy so brushing off criticism as hogwash seems to me pretty ignorant.
The core of democracy cannot be, in the words of the current American president, to be "good television". If all your democracy does is exhaust itself in staging content for social media, television and election campaigns you have inverted what the point of it is. People don't need governments so bad that ridicule becomes a daily norm, they need it to solve material problems and put food on the table. Anything else is simply decadence.
because we already collaborate, sell and trade with them all the time.
might as well collaborate with them on this as well.
At UN votes when voting about Ruzzian invasion China abstain while USA voted with Ruzzia and other most despicable dictatorships. Still waiting for a MAGA explain this 5D chess move and explain what the USA citizen won from this.
"MAGA" voted in the manchurian candidate. Dismantling oversight, accountability, throwing out old alliances and siding with the global aggressors. The US government is rapidly turning into a kleptocracy.
What's the real difference?
I know the US get to have elections but its always between family dynasties, billionaires or corporate stooges. The choice is an illusion.
Lets cut out the middleman and know we're working with a different system for societal structure rather than one that pretends otherwise.
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By negotiated peace you mean taking the agressor's side?
I mean a negotiated peace. The alternative is a drawn out conflict that either wipes out Ukraine’s male population or significantly weakens the economies of Europe and America or both. Avoiding those things is taking the side of Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans. Does it mean a dictator (Putin) gets some land? Sure. But I don’t think that’s the reason to seek peace.
This kind of reasoning made sense before the 1938 Munich agreements.
By now, we have to assume that giving a dictator a victory will only fuel his next campaign. Especially since it's a campaign for which Russia has been preparing for 70+ years – including exercises shortly before the latest invasion of Ukraine.
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In spite of this claim, Orban has won four straight elections. That's not much of an EU power is it?
Yeah likely Orban is the reason they threw away all pretexts of democracy. Hungary escaped their power.
That's not true. If only because the EU cannot cancel elections.
I suppose you're referring to Georgescu?
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If it's Georgescu you're referring to (because you don't seem to want to say so): the annulment was upheld by the ECHR.
We cannot tolerate democracy threatening extremism any longer, nor Russian interference. If anything, the EU is too soft. Orban, and to a lesser degree Fico, are a disgrace, also to their own population.
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Because in spite of the west's propaganda, Xi is a good dictator. Singapore was/is also a totalitarian state yet many do business with it.
Xi is not all powerful; no one person is. The state is powerful, not an individual. And all states are ultimately authoritarian. The only question is what form and to what end.
Is there “good” dictatorships? My personal opinion is there is no good dictator (ok, in HN context, BDFL in a SW project) I like no totalitarian regime. No one.
A benevolent dictator is the best form of government. Unfortunately though power corrupts and they have a habit of becoming self serving, and very much not benevolent.
I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach.
Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-locked congresses) which preport to "represent the people" but just turn into "nothing gets done" factories.
So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done.
There are also obviously bad dictatorships.
The analogy between projects/companies and governments is missing big components though.
- "Benevolent Dictators" of companies or projects have to obey the law - They can't forbid competition or alternatives - Every participant can leave at any time - If they burn the organization to the ground, the worst case scenario is the organization get replaced and people move on
I think it shows that we're using the word "dictator" way too casually in that case.
> So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done. There are also obviously bad dictatorships.
All dictatorships, by definition, are better at getting things done than organizations that require non-unilateral assent.
Instead, the difference between a good dictatorship and a bad dictatorship is that in a good dictatorship, dissidents are eliminated quietly or, if not quietly, then with enough spin that everyone considers their elimination to be a good thing.
In other words, what good dictatorships are good at is PR.
Also you can look at the history of the Nazis and it becomes apparent that they weren't good at much of anything except that: so successfully that "efficient Nazis" became a trope for decades after the war despite all the evidence lying around to the contrary.
How is a dictatorship different from a monarchy? There have been plenty of good monarchies throughout history. Frederick The Great, created the Prussian State. Stuart’s were well loved that they ended parliamentary democracy to restore the Stuarts. Victorian, Elizabethan era were also prosperous and well known. Ceasar was the final monarch who united the enmity between the nobles and plebs.
The problem is we look at those states and all we see is the existence of slavery (that existed in all societies till at least 1800AD), women being relegated to a different social role etc. But it is wrong to assume that any of those were due to monarchy and that a monarchy in the modern age would not rule based on modern values. Just look at Singapore, for a small example of a monarchy ruling based on current social mores. Unfortunately since WW1, monarchies throughout the world have vanished, and all we have are liberal democracies, so we can’t say either way.
I'm going to assume that you're speaking of monarchies in which the monarch is the actual ruler, rather than UK, Belgium, the Netherlands or Canada for instance, right?
In that case, I'd say that a monarchy is essentially dictatorship + a (usually) clear line of succession.
Fair enough, yes I mean monarchies proper, where the government is actually monarchical, not a ceremonial monarch.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Thailand, Bhutan might be the only monarchies left. (Monarchy + clear form of succession).
There are plenty, Singapore is an example.
> there is no good dictator
A good dictator is a...
If we want this to go anywhere, not just super computing, the first step is to get devices, useful devices, in the hands of enthusiast. That means funding projects similar to the Raspberry Pi, but for RISC-V, and perhaps mini-itx boards.
We need these cheap-ish computers in the hands of people who will port software to the platform. Without a good selection of ready to go software, the hardware is pretty irrelevant.
Such things have existed for several years already! Here are some examples:
There is even a Raspberry Pi model which includes two RISC-V cores alongside its ARM cores:Milk-V has much more than the duo. I have a few of their products and they're very cool!
The biggest problem with them is software. Many boards only have buildroot SDKs or niche and outdated. Fedora related images.
Though if you're experienced you can port your own linux distributions to these boards.
But Duo is a device in the form factor of Arduino Nano that can run actual Linux (the 256MB RAM version at least). It's quite a leap.
The framework main board is surely that?
https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard
No it's not. For HPC good software support for the vector extension is basically everything that matters, and the framework main board doesn't support that extension.
I would currently recommend the BananaPI BPI-F3 or the OrangePI RV2 for that purpose, as they both have the same SpacemiT X60 cores, which support the vector extension.
Sadly there are currently only in-order cores with RVV support available. Getting a cheap out-of-order implementation is the next most important thing for improving software support.
Tenstorrent has announced they will release a 8x Ascalon devboard and laptop next year: https://youtu.be/ttQtC1dQqwo?t=1035
Thank you! I've been waiting for a viable RVV board for a long time. Just ordered the OrangePi RV2.
This unblocks me properly working to optimize for vector support in software. OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
Yes, I know I could use qemu, but it's not the same. I feel like this is what unblocks me on the software side.
> OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
The problem is that there are some things in RVV where it's unclear how they will perform on high perf OoO cores:
* general choice of LMUL: on in-order cores it's clear that maximizing LMUL without spilling is the best approach, for OoO this isn't clear.
* How will LMUL>1 vrgather and vcompress perform?
* How high is the impact of vsetvli instructions? Is it worth trying to move them outside of loops whenever possible, or is the impact minimal like in the current in-order implementations.
* What is the overhead of using .vx instruction variants, is there additional cost involved in moving between GPRs and vector registers?
* Is there additional overhead when reinterpreting vector masks?
* What performance can we expect from the more complex load/stores, especially the segmented ones.
The LLVM scheduling models give some insight:
* SiFive P670: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Targ...
* Tenstorrent Ascalon: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Targ... (still missing the vector part, but there is supposed to be a PR in the near future)
I'm trying to collect as much info on hardware as I can: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/index.html
Awesome, thanks for sharing that.
https://milkv.io/duo
Gives you something to play around with, very inexpensively.
But really, virtual machines may be preferable; at least to get started.
> But really, virtual machines may be preferable; at least to get started.
And what shall one emulate in a VM ? A nonexisting physical processor ? /s
https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-riscv.html
I'm almost certain that this is exactly how it works in processor design. You start building your compiler before the processor is finished, and test it with the emulator.
At least, in quantum computing, that's how it works.
Wouldn't this be ideal though? Emulate the processor we'd like to have and work backwards to see if it can be built?
98% of debian packages build for riscv already, and a variety of pi like boards are available
Yup. We need hobbyists to bootstrap the process. Preferably in schools too.
I know there is Orange Pi Riscv but maybe there are other cheap hardwares.
I posted this link to HN not very long ago: https://liliputing.com/orange-pi-rv2-is-a-single-board-pc-wi...
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43309376
It rather should be for general computing too starting with government office computers.
Yeah they'll be slow but nothing can be slower than an x86 loaded with a Windows 11 or something on it.
Also, even a 10 year old x86 system is fine for web browsing and office tasks. If RISC-V hit that level, it’d be fine for many millions of people.
> Yeah they'll be slow but nothing can be slower than an x86 loaded with a Windows 11 or something on it.
I nearly spit out my tea laughing.
That's going to be hard to beat, yes..
Here are some relevant slides from hpcasia25: https://github.com/RISCVtestbed/riscvtestbed.github.io/blob/...
I also found this report on their FPGA Emulation Platform: https://www.riser-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/RISE...
So from these resources it seems like they develop a vector processor with Semidynamics out-of-order Atrevido core as a scalar core and their Vitruvius VPU.
There is a paper about a previous iteration of the VPU: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3575861
In the more recent report they have a vector length of 16,384 bits, with 16 lanes (8 in FPGA, 16 in the diagram, final version could be more), so total of 16*64=1024 bits of ALUs.
Slide 15 seems to indicate that they want to create a chip with 32 of those cores, a shared L3 cache, and access to HBM.
Naturally the next step is to also rely in OSes and programming languages not controlled by export regulations.
There’s a certain irony here as ARM is 100% British European.
Sorry to break it to you but its owned by Softbank. So technically its Japanese and ideogically its heavy US VC funds aligned.
And the CEO is an American based in California.
It is pretty hard to call Arm, or any decently sized modern company, 100% anything.
https://careers.arm.com/locations
I see the point but you really care about
- Who Owns it (Japan) - Where is it headquartered (Cambridge) - Where is most of the IP produced (Cambridge mostly, but the remainder is in the US)
So if we care about being fast, surely the most expedient way, complete with guaranteed success, is to simply buy out softbank and then bring any IP development that's been offshored to the US back to Europe?
If they feel like offering licenses, I bet European companies will appreciate.
Besides they are no longer 100% as you mention.
There's nothing to celebrate here. This is another sad moment for Europeans everywhere.
> The first phase of this six-year endeavor is backed by €240 million (£200 million, $260 million) in funding.
For this to be a serious effort it would take another two zeros at the end of that number. This is 100x too small.
In 6 years, we'll have spent a pittance, to realize that we got basically nothing for it, and we're even further behind the US whose companies are spending tens of billions to develop new accelerators.
Let's take one US company at random, Groq, they've raised 10x this amount of money. That's one startup. Never mind Cerebras, SambaNova, Tenstorrent, etc. How is this effort going to compete? And they're giving the money to "38 leading partners" instead of one focused entity. It won't compete. It's just a waste.
The EU is still thinking too small. In an era where the US is no longer a reliable partner (maybe even a rival), and where Taiwan could disappear overnight, this is extremely stupid and dangerous.
I don't understand why the EU can't get serious about tech. Why does every investment need to be peanuts? Why can't we pay people well so they don't all leave to the US/Canada? Why can't we seriously invest in startups?
Who in Europe would fund something bigger? Governments are tight on money and in many countries a aging population is overwhelming the welfare state while at the same time defense spending must go up dramatically and yesterday.
Private investors in Europe don't have the very deep pockets of US tech investors and there is much less of a culture of risk taking in investing in Europe on top of that
Edit: to be clear, I agree with your general point.
Speculation is that most of these EU funding efforts aren't for producing viable competitors but industry subsidry - jobs programs with a dash of embezzling.
Maybe someone from Europe could weigh in? I'm probably wrong, if the funding is transparent it should be easy to confirm or deny.
You make a point. However, I'm not sure how it'd be possible.
The US has been funded by an insane level of debt for the last 60+ years. Debt that might come calling quite soon, according to Donald Trump's own treasure secretary, iirc, and might even be the reason for all the current apparent international Trump-craziness (well, Trump being a narcissist certainly doesn't help).
While the EU has serious debt, if I understand correctly, that's several orders of magnitude smaller when compared to GNP, which limits the ability of the EU to invest.
Given the stunningly low performance of risc-v chips that make a raspberry Pi look fast, I'm wondering how soon this is supposed to pay off.
Everybody who "bets on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty" will probably end up buying Chinese anyway.
Why? Genuinely curious
(Jumping to assume what the original commenter meant:)
China is pushing RISC V aggressively, and might be a lot more likely to succeed in making competitively powerful cores than €240M pounds spent in Europe, where money won’t go nearly as far.
I imagine one of the biggest constraints on success here is just expertise. If Apple’s hardware team, or Qualcomm’s Oryon team were tasked with making a high performance RISC V CPU, I’m sure they could crank out something incredible pretty quick. But I have a feeling practical expertise on this sort of cutting edge hardware design is a rare thing. Frankly no idea how this human capital compares between Europe and China, but I’ll be excited to see progress and genuine competition on open architectures like this
I work in this space and I would say it's pretty even between Europe (the UK in particular, but also other countries like the Netherlands and France) and China.
> where money won’t go nearly as far
I'm not sure about this either - apparently high tech salaries in China are not out of line with Europe (both are way less than America).
But China does have more enormous companies that can fund their own chips (e.g. ByteDance).
RISC-V is interop as the ISA level. No wonder EU and even china are moving towards this US standard.
Could you maybe explain this a bit more? I'd like to understand better what the value is.
https://riscv.org/about/faq/
RISC architecture is going to change everything
RISC? RISC has changed everything 20 years ago. That's done already.
Or did you mean RISC-V?
it's a movie quote
Oops. Haven't seen that movie in a while :)
No, an open architecture that's widely accepted and implemented is going to.
RISC is good.
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The current crop of cores were designed several years ago before some key standards were adopted. They exist mostly to experiment and allow early adopters to develop software.
Next generation cores from companies like Ventana claim very high performance (we’ll see what PPW ends up being). Tenstorrent has already started talking about an extremely wide core to follow their already 8-wide designs. Qualcomm seems quite interested in the idea of moving from ARM to RISCV and there are other companies working on big stuff, but it takes 4-5 years and the final pieces of the puzzle only fell into place a couple years ago, so the designs are all in progress.
This is exactly correct. There is a long walk between working ISA and a high performance device that can sustain high IPC. Alibaba has the C930 now, only a few day ago. There are no credible performance figures on it yet, but they've made fast server grade ARMs, so they know how to build high performance CPUs. Then, as you say, there is Tenstorrent and Keller.
Can "Europe" achieve anything here? Anything is possible, I suppose... But given the players already at it, Europe is already way behind the curve.
Independent of instruction set, RISC-V processors will have to learn what ARM lerned. It will take time… yes
Depending on who's involved in the design of the processors, they don't have to relearn anything. Hire the people who made efficient ARM processors to develop efficient RISC-V processors using comparable techniques. This will increase costs for quality chips (those engineers can probably command a very high compensation package), but substantially reduces the time to market for competitive hardware.
Surely arm is a better choice?
ARM Holdings is, ah, not necessarily the easiest company to work with. See the Qualcomm saga: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/arm_qualcomm_nuvia/
The _current_ big EU supercomputer initiative does use ARM designs (https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/14/sipearl_rhea1_specs/ ), but you wouldn’t necessarily want to be totally dependent on them if you can help it.
ARM just sued their largest customer.
ARM just announced they are manufacturing their own chips for the first time further threatening their customers (despite testifying the exact opposite in court a couple months ago).
Since SoftBank took over, their company has shifted and proved that when a standard is controlled by one company, there will eventually be issues.
Switching to RISC means those issues won’t ever happen again.
Choosing RISC-V here is more about how much soverienty a country has over the IP than anything else here. The US can probably consider most-all ARM IP to be dual use technology and immediately deny use of it.
RISC-V being based out of Switzerland, the ISA being under a permissive Creative Commons license, and most software tools being FOSS is definitely why it's being adopted here. It's completely isolated from all geopolitics.
> The US can probably consider most-all ARM IP to be dual use technology and immediately deny use of it.
The US (certainly the current US) can do that, but (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings):
“Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a Japanese-owned British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England”
There are still ARM offices in the US in which their work, IP, etc would be subject to export restrictions.
ARM in stock listed in New York, it cant avoid US assertions
So what, there's nothing done in America that can't be brought back to Cambridge or London just as easily as we offshored it.
If Europe is making a serious investment then it has more than enough power to say "you'll get the contract if you divest of X,Y,Z"
ARM is a British company. We are in Europe.
It was founded in Britain, but it is a Japanese company ATM as per it's SoftBank ownership.
So what? Japan are Europe's enemy now? Could the EU not just buy 25% or something?
Its specifically Softbank which might be japanese but its very much aligned with US and VC funds. It might as well be VC fund.
So what? What's the scenario here?
The USA pressures Japan to stop selling licences to European Fabs? Why, what would push them to such extremes?
Fabs can still produce those current designs (they just don't have licences). Now Europe can buy SoftBank out, or Britain can just walk into ARM Cambridge and say it's been sequested for the war effort.
Given ARM is mostly an IP bsaed company that wouldn't really work. For reference just look at what happened with ARM's china susidiary with which this basically happened.
ARM China is a sales office. Not the same thing at all. If a design is made in a British office of a British company, 'by hook or by crook' the state can gain access to it. That's the hard, perhaps slightly uncomfortable truth.
Of course it would only ever come to this if softbank refused to sell and there was some national security angle.
If ARM want to close their office here, then the state can hire all their engineers and offer immunity/void on any NDA they've signed with ARM, if anything that's actually the most desirable outcome.
Again we're talking about things that simply aren't going to happen, and if they do there are much much bigger problems.
And non-Apple Silicon is British?
ARM Holdings is British. Anyone making ARM cores (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon’s Graviton…) is paying licensing fees to a British company.
Arm even tried to cancel Qualcomm’s licensing agreement back in the fall. Using RISC V entirely circumvents not only royalty payments, but legal battles like that (frivolous or not).
I'm all in for RISC-V, but ARM Holdings is British (and owned by the Japanese SoftBank group). ASML is in the The Netherlands. And there are some European ARM CPU vendors (NXP, ST Microelectronics, etc.). So Europe could also standardize on ARM without sovereignty issues?
Why risking doing that if you can go to ASML and those vendors to manucature you RISC which isnt owned by Softbank…
I think we should definitely invest in RISC-V, open is preferable, especially in a continent-wide initiative. I’m just contesting that the US could unilaterally sabotage ARM use in Europe.
Because almost all software runs on arm today, almost none (comparatively) runs on risc-v.
Or perhaps because ARM is miles ahead of risc-v today.
ISA differences are very small. Not enough choose one over another when there are more important issues at stake.
When making sophisticated big projects, usually weighting many considerations, not just architecture.
Even more, some considerations could have more weight then architecture for particular case.
Examples are good compiler/libs/frameworks, some specific software, good support, experience on similar contracts, big number of professionals with military clearance.
That's why some long time IBM won most govt contracts on supercomputers.
But once IBM decided, govt is not interest enough client and after that moment, most contracts won by Intel.
Also in Intel case at 8086 years, very important was large number of support chips, greatly surpass any concurrent.
Examples was video chips, io chips, MMU, numerical coprocessor.
At that time (8086) Intel produced even RAM and ROM chips, so govt could buy all from one contractor, and this is also good in some cases.
It is not for the rest of the world who are banned from using advanced US technology so best for the world is for China to get to parity on node size as well as rest of the world to adopt RISC-V.
Not if your goal is to decouple from the US.
ARM Holdings is a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, and so not a US company. In what other sense is it coupled with the US?
The EU is better off trying to build a local capability, riscv is the best bet as you dont need an architecture/ISA license or dependencies on geopolitics
RISC-V is an open standard. ARM still needs to be licensed.
The world is abandoning rent seekers.
Is ARM better than RiSC? How many RISC computers can I go buy right now at the local Carrefour here in Barcelona? Weird definition of “abandoning.”
RISC-V is probably no different than ARM at it's core. Also, both of them are RISC ISAs.
Right now, you are far more likely to use RISC-V and not know it than to knowingly interact with RISC-V directly. For example, since about 2015, Nvidia has used RISC-V as an onboard controller for their GPUs.
Western Digital also announced they were looking (have already?) to move to RISC-V.
If you manufacture items at scale, getting away from ARM licensing costs per unit makes financial sense. Especially if you already have in-house expertise who can design chips tuned to your specific requirements.
Both ARM and RISC-V are Reduced Instruction Set Compute (RISC) instead of Complex Instruction Set Compute (CISC aka x86) architectures. So it's more about the tooling that makes one better than the other. And like all open source, the tooling will be better over time as people and organizations recognize they get more back out of contributing to open systems.
That's way too optimistic. If it's like "all open source," it will have some improvements, forks and then nothing. There are only so many people who can contribute to chip development, and they all have jobs.
LLVM and GCC succeed because it’s cheaper to add support to a couple open tools than build your own competing compiler.
Wait. I thought the Musk-Trump regime was going to usher in a glorious post-scarcity economy based on the genius and purity of crypto?
I'm not native English speaker but I think that the current and near situation in local Carrefour would be influenced by “abandoned” rather than “abandoning”.
RISC-V's vector extension ("V") is markedly "Cray"-like.
Depends on what criteria you use for "better". ARM is surely more advanced technologically, but RISC-V may be a more future-proof decision as you're not necessarily tied in to one company that may change their licensing costs in the future.