14 ms·
Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing
- LightBug1 2y agoRISC architecture is going to change everything
- lokimedes 2y agoRISC is good.
- nine_k 2y agoNo, an open architecture that's widely accepted and implemented is going to.
- Yoric 2y agoRISC? RISC has changed everything 20 years ago. That's done already. Or did you mean RISC-V?
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoit's a movie quote
- Yoric 2y agoOops. Haven't seen that movie in a while :)
- mrweasel 2y agoIf 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- markus_zhang 2y agoYup. 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.
- tux1968 2y agohttps://milkv.io/duo 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.
- hulitu 2y ago> 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
- tux1968 2y agohttps://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-riscv.html https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-riscv.html
- XorNot 2y agoWouldn't this be ideal though? Emulate the processor we'd like to have and work backwards to see if it can be built?
- Yoric 2y agoI'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.
- zamadatix 2y ago"Virtual Machine" doesn't place restrictions on whether the guest's CPU is emulated or not despite "CPU virtualization" explicitly meaning "the instructions are not emulated". It's a bit wonky and I wish the terms had some more separation for clarifying exactly this case.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- matt-p 2y agoSurely arm is a better choice?
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoRISC-V's vector extension ("V") is markedly "Cray"-like.
- daveguy 2y agoRISC-V is an open standard. ARM still needs to be licensed. The world is abandoning rent seekers.
- briandear 2y agoIs 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.”
- daveguy 2y agoBoth 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.
- tgv 2y agoThat'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.
- hajile 2y agoLLVM and GCC succeed because it’s cheaper to add support to a couple open tools than build your own competing compiler.
- throwaway888abc 2y agoChina 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-boost-risc-v-chip-use-nationwide-sources-2025-03-04/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-publish-policy-boos...
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoI think it'd be nice for collaboration across all nations that want to take part.
- briandear 2y agoIf the goal is to decouple from the U.S., why would the EU want to collaborate with a totalitarian state like China?
- brendoelfrendo 2y agoThe 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.
- microtonal 2y agoThere'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.
- qwerty456127 2y agoEverybody who "bets on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty" will probably end up buying Chinese anyway.
- muxamilian 2y agoWhy? Genuinely curious
- turtletontine 2y ago(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
- IshKebab 2y agoI 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).
- throawayonthe 2y ago[dead]
- theodric 2y ago[flagged]
- f1shy 2y agoIndependent of instruction set, RISC-V processors will have to learn what ARM lerned. It will take time… yes
- Jtsummers 2y agoDepending 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.
- hajile 2y agoThe 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.
- topspin 2y agoThis 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.
- pjmlp 2y agoNaturally the next step is to also rely in OSes and programming languages not controlled by export regulations.
- sylware 2y agoRISC-V is interop as the ISA level. No wonder EU and even china are moving towards this US standard.
- dan_can_code 2y agoCould you maybe explain this a bit more? I'd like to understand better what the value is.
- sylware 2y agohttps://riscv.org/about/faq/ https://riscv.org/about/faq/
- camel-cdr 2y agoHere are some relevant slides from hpcasia25: https://github.com/RISCVtestbed/riscvtestbed.github.io/blob/main/assets/files/hpcasia25/Openchip.pdf 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/RISER_D3.1_FPGA_Emulation_Platform_v1.0_Final.pdf 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 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.
- trollbridge 2y agoThere’s a certain irony here as ARM is 100% British European.
- pjmlp 2y agoIf they feel like offering licenses, I bet European companies will appreciate. Besides they are no longer 100% as you mention.
- omnimus 2y agoSorry to break it to you but its owned by Softbank. So technically its Japanese and ideogically its heavy US VC funds aligned.
- freddie_mercury 2y agoAnd 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 https://careers.arm.com/locations
- matt-p 2y agoI 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?
- wg0 2y agoIt 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.
- fransje26 2y ago> 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..
- acdha 2y agoAlso, 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.
- Paianni 2y agoI discovered recently that a Raspberry Pi 5 would be faster than both my sister's and parents' PCs. Just a shame that all cheap ARM boards need proprietary kernels.
- preisschild 2y agoProblem is in most schools here you only learn word-processing/data-entry on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office... So youd have to convince a lot of people to learn other tools
- light_hue_1 2y agoThere'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?
- ajmurmann 2y agoWho 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.
- Yoric 2y agoYou 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.
- 2y ago
- CaffeineLD50 2y agoGiven 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.
- CaffeineLD50 2y ago[flagged]
- countWSS 2y ago> Axelera's chips follow a similar formula as other AI ASICs, such as Google's tensor processing units. The Dutch outfit's current silicon feature four accelerator cores, each with a matrix multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit, a RISC-V control core to make the accelerator programmable, and some digital signal processors which handle neural network activation functions. This seems very focused on current architecture, which could be replaced with something more novel without the fundamental limits of matrix multiplication.
- p0w3n3d 2y agoWhen I read > 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-hidden-backdoor-widely-used-esp32-microchip.html https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid... which defies idea of sovereignty at all.
- suraci 2y ago> At the moment the war is already lost the war against whom?
- p0w3n3d 2y agoLet's make a thought exercise: Imagine Europe must, for some reason,s impose duties on anything from China. Like Europe says, 'Hey, you're burning too much coal, I will stop your cars with my tariffs.' China says, 'Okay, I will put duties on the parts, chips and batteries you're buying from me.' Now, Europe won't be able to produce any cars anymore. We've seen this already when COVID-19 stopped car production in the EU. 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.
- suraci 2y agoI was not challenging your conclusion, just not sure it's against China or the USA, both possible, right? 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