Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

[throwaway888abc]

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...

[tw04]

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.

[duskwuff]

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.

[briandear]

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

[ndsipa_pomu]

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

[mrweasel]

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.

[marssaxman]

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/

[anotherhue]

The framework main board is surely that?

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

[ndsipa_pomu]

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

[tux1968]

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.

[Palomides]

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

[markus_zhang]

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.

[wg0]

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.

[light_hue_1]

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?

[camel-cdr]

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.

[pjmlp]

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

[trollbridge]

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

[omnimus]

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

[pjmlp]

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

Besides they are no longer 100% as you mention.

[p0w3n3d]

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.

[suraci]

> At the moment the war is already lost

the war against whom?

[countWSS]

> 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.

[sylware]

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

[dan_can_code]

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

[CaffeineLD50]

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.

[qwerty456127]

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

[muxamilian]

Why? Genuinely curious

[LightBug1]

RISC architecture is going to change everything

[Yoric]

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

Or did you mean RISC-V?

[nine_k]

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

[lokimedes]

RISC is good.

[hajile]

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.

[f1shy]

Independent of instruction set, RISC-V processors will have to learn what ARM lerned. It will take time… yes

[matt-p]

Surely arm is a better choice?

[rsynnott]

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.

[hajile]

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.

[6SixTy]

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.

[daveguy]

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

The world is abandoning rent seekers.

[nabla9]

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

[boredatoms]

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

[ndsipa_pomu]

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.

[johnnyjeans]

Not if your goal is to decouple from the US.

[xbmcuser]

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.

[simne]

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.

[cmrdporcupine]

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