China to publish policy to boost RISC-V chip use nationwide, sources say https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-publish-policy-boos...
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.
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.
Shouldn't it be the mandate of liberal democracies to enable liberal democracies and to prevent authoritarian entities from growing power and reach?
RISC-V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
"Ask HN: How much would it cost to build a RISC CPU out of carbon?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41153490 with nanoimprinting (which 10x's current gen nanolithography FWIU)
"Nanoimprint Lithography Aims to Take on EUV" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575111 :
> Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.
The EU needs to be in a position where it can decide what is best for Europeans and not be strong-armed or overly dependent on allies that clearly don't share the same concern.
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.
It's not as crazy as electing Trump, of course.
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).
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.
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.
The x86-64 architecture is on its way out globally thanks to Arm. RISC V is not needed for decoupling from the US.
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 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!
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?
Russian presence in Syria prevented this but they're gone now.
In the future we can balance Russian cheap gas with Qatari cheap gas to not be held hostage by either party.
It would be a mistake to build dependencies on China when it's possible to avoid having dependencies at all.
might as well collaborate with them on this as well.
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.
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.
https://sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550
https://sifive.com/boards/hifive1-rev-b
https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-fire
https://starfivetech.com/en/site/boards
https://milkv.io/docs/duo/getting-started/duo256m
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/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.
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
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.
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43309376
Gives you something to play around with, very inexpensively.
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
At least, in quantum computing, that's how it works.
I know there is Orange Pi Riscv but maybe there are other cheap hardwares.
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..
So youd have to convince a lot of people to learn other tools
> 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?
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.
Maybe someone from Europe could weigh in? I'm probably wrong, if the funding is transparent it should be easy to confirm or deny.
1. It is a single entity but composed of teams from 38 different partners. They have a "consortium". It has its disadvantages but it is not a completely independent funding.
2. The "consortium" may have asked for much more (between 5x to 20x more) and was probably denied.
As to your question of why we cannot seriously invest in startups?
- Because we do not have a single funding agency across whole of Europe. Each country has its own funding problems and Germany has its debt brake. So, the funding is not unified. Each country wants to fund 10 of its own startups instead of Europe by itself funding 10. This means 10x less money. EU Horizon projects didn't focus on industry at all. EuroHPC is a very new, 4 years into its first projects.
- There's no funding because we do not have customers! None of European tech companies will benefit from chips enough to invest in new tech. All of them are running old technologies. Car companies are to blame here because they are the biggest customers in Germany and they think of themselves as only car companies. No one in Germany is doing AI for cars for FSD for example. In general, European consumption is very backward and low-tech.
- Europe is finding it very hard to raise capital from outside Europe due to various reasons. Like Groq raised 650M from Saudi Arabia. In Europe, that is politically impossible.
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.
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.
- 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?
It is pretty hard to call Arm, or any decently sized modern company, 100% anything.
Besides they are no longer 100% as you mention.
> Europe bets on supercomputing sovereignty
I'm laughing and dying inside. Europe has forfeited all possibilities on creating their own chips, partially because of production regime, partially because we were never good in this subject. At the moment the war is already lost (yes, I consider any negotiation for resources a war, whether in law creation or in movement of forces). Therefore, we're condemned to rely on China's supplies, and chips supplied by China will have this
https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid...
which defies idea of sovereignty at all.
the war against whom?
And chips are everywhere. Hence, the EU is dependent on China. Q.E.D.
Or maybe I am mistaken. Please tell me what you think regarding the above.
as for the thought exercise...
I have to say that the only way for the EU to be 'independent' is for it to be sanctioned by either China or the US.
For example, since 2000, China has attempted to develop its domestic chip industry with hundreds of billions of dollars, but this effort never materialized until chip sanctions were imposed under the Trump and Biden administrations
btw, i don't think this will come true:
> China says, 'Okay, I will put duties on the parts, chips and batteries you're buying from me.'
it's very unlikely that China will actively limit export for products, it harms more to China itself, it's more possible to limit export for resources like rare metals
This seems very focused on current architecture, which could be replaced with something more novel without the fundamental limits of matrix multiplication.
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
> 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).
Or did you mean RISC-V?
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 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.
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 (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”
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).
The world is abandoning rent seekers.
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.
ARM will get you power faster.
But in the long run, RISC-V will be the most powerful.
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.
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.