Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/07/dare_europe_risc_v_project/

by muxamilian • 1 year ago

219 207 1 year ago

mrweasel• 1 year ago

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.

markus_zhang• 1 year ago

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.

tux19682• 1 year ago

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• 1 year 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

ndsipa_pomu4• 1 year ago

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

Palomides• 1 year ago

98% of debian packages build for riscv already, and a variety of pi like boards are available

anotherhue• 1 year ago

The framework main board is surely that?

https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard

littlestymaar• 1 year ago

Awesome, thanks for sharing that.

camel-cdr3• 1 year ago

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

marssaxman• 1 year ago

Such things have existed for several years already! Here are some examples:

  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

There is even a Raspberry Pi model which includes two RISC-V cores alongside its ARM cores:

  https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/

Levitating• 1 year ago

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.

matt-p11• 1 year ago

Surely arm is a better choice?

daveguy3• 1 year ago

RISC-V is an open standard. ARM still needs to be licensed.

The world is abandoning rent seekers.

briandear2• 1 year ago

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.”

ndsipa_pomu4• 1 year ago

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.

snvzz• 1 year ago

Mandatory Light/Dark side of the force reference.

ARM will get you power faster.

But in the long run, RISC-V will be the most powerful.

johnnyjeans• 1 year ago

Not if your goal is to decouple from the US.

CharlesW• 1 year ago

ARM Holdings is a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, and so not a US company. In what other sense is it coupled with the US?

nabla9• 1 year ago

ISA differences are very small. Not enough choose one over another when there are more important issues at stake.

boredatoms2• 1 year ago

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

6SixTy3• 1 year ago

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.

38362936482• 1 year ago

And non-Apple Silicon is British?

Someone• 1 year ago

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”

microtonal3• 1 year ago

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?

matt-p11• 1 year ago

ARM is a British company. We are in Europe.

xbmcuser• 1 year ago

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.

simne2• 1 year ago

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.

simne2• 1 year ago

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.

cmrdporcupine2• 1 year ago

RISC-V's vector extension ("V") is markedly "Cray"-like.

rsynnott• 1 year ago

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.

hajile2• 1 year ago

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.

throwaway888abc• 1 year ago

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...

ndsipa_pomu4• 1 year ago

I think it'd be nice for collaboration across all nations that want to take part.

briandear2• 1 year ago

If the goal is to decouple from the U.S., why would the EU want to collaborate with a totalitarian state like China?

brendoelfrendo• 1 year ago

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.

gregman1• 1 year ago

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.

swarnie• 1 year ago

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.

dgellow2• 1 year ago

The US is extremely chaotic and unpredictable. China is fairly stable and predictable.

addicted2• 1 year ago

If it’s open source it doesn’t matter who the state they’re collaborating with is.

tntxtnt• 1 year ago

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.

simion314• 1 year ago

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.

regularjack• 1 year ago

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.

tehjoker2• 1 year ago

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.

happymellon2• 1 year ago

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.

matt-p11• 1 year ago

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

znpy3• 1 year ago

because we already collaborate, sell and trade with them all the time.

might as well collaborate with them on this as well.

MaxPock2• 1 year ago

EU is friends with totalitarian states like Bahrain,Syria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.What's wrong with working with another totalitarian state ?

duskwuff• 1 year ago

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.

tw04• 1 year ago

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.

amelius• 1 year ago

Didn't ARM start in Europe?

thomasahle• 1 year ago

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.

MaxPock2• 1 year ago

"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?

snailmailstare• 1 year ago

The EU needs to build arms to defend itself that the US can't interfere with and knows less about, and so does China.

dumbledoren• 1 year ago

The military 'ambitions' of China exist only because the military ambitions of the US exist.

qwerty456127• 1 year ago

Everybody who "bets on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty" will probably end up buying Chinese anyway.

muxamilian• 1 year ago

Why? Genuinely curious

turtletontine2• 1 year 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

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

Naturally the next step is to also rely in OSes and programming languages not controlled by export regulations.

sylware2• 1 year ago

RISC-V is interop as the ISA level. No wonder EU and even china are moving towards this US standard.

dan_can_code• 1 year ago

Could you maybe explain this a bit more? I'd like to understand better what the value is.

sylware2• 1 year ago

https://riscv.org/about/faq/

camel-cdr3• 1 year ago

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.

trollbridge• 1 year ago

There’s a certain irony here as ARM is 100% British European.

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

If they feel like offering licenses, I bet European companies will appreciate.

Besides they are no longer 100% as you mention.

omnimus5• 1 year ago

Sorry to break it to you but its owned by Softbank. So technically its Japanese and ideogically its heavy US VC funds aligned.

freddie_mercury• 1 year ago

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

matt-p11• 1 year ago

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?

LightBug1• 1 year ago

RISC architecture is going to change everything

lokimedes• 1 year ago

RISC is good.

nine_k3• 1 year ago

No, an open architecture that's widely accepted and implemented is going to.

Yoric6• 1 year ago

RISC? RISC has changed everything 20 years ago. That's done already.

Or did you mean RISC-V?

cmrdporcupine2• 1 year ago

it's a movie quote

wg0• 1 year ago

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.

fransje26• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

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.

Paianni• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

Problem 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• 1 year ago

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?

ajmurmann• 1 year ago

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.

Yoric6• 1 year ago

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.

intelVISA• 1 year ago

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.

Havoc• 1 year ago

Comparing cpu centric startups to AI accelerator ones on funding raised in current climate is a little silly.

triknomeister• 1 year ago

Not completely disagreeing with you but:

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.

CaffeineLD50• 1 year ago

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.

countWSS• 1 year 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.

p0w3n3d2• 1 year ago

When 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-hid...

which defies idea of sovereignty at all.

suraci4• 1 year ago

At the moment the war is already lost

the war against whom?

p0w3n3d2• 1 year ago

Let'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.

Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

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