Have you noticed the words "non-commercial" at the bottom of the page?
The random dude is not looking for funding.
dathinab 3 hours ago [-]
non-commercial doesn't mean not looking for funding (neither does it mean looking for funding)
it means not intended with the purpose to make money from it
founding doesn't always imply. a startup-like process of selling stock (or similar) to investors which in turn want some profit from it long term
it can also mean looking for donations to found a project, i.e. cover it's costs
kjs3 1 hours ago [-]
You don't accomplish anything like this without funding. This is computing fanfic, at best.
wodenokoto 3 hours ago [-]
Did you notice the words "funding phase"?
jurgenburgen 2 hours ago [-]
founding != funding
ymz5 3 hours ago [-]
No, I did not. Are you looking at some other page?
ymz5 4 hours ago [-]
Author here. Happy to answer technical questions: about HFI BIOS, partitioning hypervisor (gRouvr), QSOE RTOS.
I hope that leading European industrial computer manufacturers notice the initiative and join -- or at least start evaluating the possibility to use RVA23 SoCs in their devices. Yes, currently only Chinese vendors can provide such chips, but the world is changing fast.
RetroTechie 15 minutes ago [-]
Why the emphasis on RVA23? Since when are vector instructions a minimal necessity? Plain RV64GC is mooore than powerful enough for industrial/machine controllers & the like - assuming a standard sw/hw platform.
What's missing here is the "made in Europe" bit. Currently (very few exceptions), RISC-V SoCs are designed by Chinese companies, maybe fabricated in Taiwan, and boards they go on manufactured in China.
Imho that is what Europe needs to address. With EU-made boards available, the software side is the easy part.
There is some European CPU initiative. Sounds great but where are the boards?
guidoiaquinti 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
strofocles 2 hours ago [-]
So one person creates a (fantasy ?) website and it gets on the 1st page of HN being mistaken for an European initiative?
cbolton 6 hours ago [-]
This is just a webpage some individual put up, right? I mean as far as I can see there's no institute, no company, no government behind this. Just one RISC-V enthusiast on the contact page.
revengerwizard 6 hours ago [-]
It also seems AI generated?
Great idea, but if the important EU players aren't there, what's the point?
hn_submit 7 hours ago [-]
Is this something more than a flag-waiving exercise? Who's actually manufacturing and selling these "European" CPUs?
I just purchased a boatload of Chinese RISC-V development boards for about $2.30 a piece. Can't wait to start playing with them.
"RISC(-V) architecture is going to change everything."
Compared to x86, which is wholly owned by an American duopoly and needs licensing to produce legally, boosting RISC-V is a major step towards chip independence for Europe. With the current state of the US it almost seems a necessity. The only downside here is that it didn't happen sooner.
glimshe 6 hours ago [-]
What about ARM? Isn't it also European?
LeFantome 44 minutes ago [-]
Others have already talked about the Japanese and Suadis.
My point would be that it has already been demonstrated that you can lose access to ARM technology as a consequence of US sanctions.
ARM is not a sufficiently independent ISA to guarantee sovereignty.
With RISC-V, you may lose access to a specific core, chip, or supply chain. But your ecosystem can pivot to an alternative. Long-term, you have the option of complete in-sourcing.
So, even working with Chinese chips and boards today can be progress, as long as more domestic RVA23 options can be expected to arrive later.
lioeters 6 hours ago [-]
While ARM Holdings is based in Cambridge, England, it is majority owned by SoftBank Group which is a Japanese investment conglomerate.
What's important in the context of a European "sovereign computing" initiative is the licensing of the instruction set architecture. Like x86, ARM is still proprietary, while RISC-V is a free and open standard.
pepperoni_pizza 6 hours ago [-]
SoftBank is technically hedquartered in Japan but it is mostly owned by Saudis.
Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago [-]
This statement seems to be factually untrue. Mashayoshi Son owns 32-33% of Softbank and then the investors are like the Japanese Master Trust bank etc. Saudi Arabia is not even in top 10 of the investors list.
Saudi Arabia did recently invest 45 billion dollars in the vision fund which is an investment fund managed by Softbank but they haven't really invested within Softbank itself so not it is not mostly owned by Saudis from what the data can tell.
hn_submit 6 hours ago [-]
It is if you define the UK being in Europe (the continent). It isn't part of the EU as of today, although there's a good chance it will be again in the future.
Even though it's Japanese-owned most of their R&D still takes place in England.
ishouldnotbutk8 3 hours ago [-]
You don't need to define the UK being in Europe. UK is and forever will be in Europe, full stop.
I know that sometimes "European" is used as a synonym for "in the EU", but most of the time this is sloppy. Nobody in Europe thinks UK is "not European".
sylware 4 hours ago [-]
ARM is still IP locked like x86_64.
RISC-V is IP UNlocked. I bought RISC-V mini-boards (so cheap) years ago because I was planning to build my keyboard... but I am still on other projects... and there are even better RISC-V miniboard nowdays (better USB, more GPIOs... for a full fledge BFO-9000 keyboard!).
What I am waiting for are RISC-V high performance micro-architectures which will use the best silicon node (desktop, mobile, and for servers it seems there are a few attempts). One of the main issue seems... the compressed instructions which should be removed as it increases implementation complexity significantly in order to apply some of the known high-performance optimizations (it is not anectodale if ARM removed thumb machine instructions).
I like the idea, I code as much as possible things in RISC-V assembly now, and re-use a ton of code paths (at the assembly level!). I have even written a small RISC-V interpreter for x86_64 for static exes.
hn_submit 6 hours ago [-]
Even if Intel licensed x86 no one in Europe would want to make them. Unless they're guaranteed a monopoly there will be no takers. European companies and conglomerates are extremely lazy and risk averse.
All they want is to suck on the government's tit.
ErikCorry 2 hours ago [-]
These implement 16-register cut down RISC-V RV32EC_Zmmul instruction set. It's an interesting choice. I wonder if they can run Coremark or Dhrystone so one can get an impression of their performance at 48MHz.
8k RAM, 64k ROM, compressed RISC-V insn set.
Edit: Apparently it's a QingKe RISC-V with about 130 Coremark.
kragen 43 seconds ago [-]
They shouldn't have any trouble running Dhrystone, either. RV32EC_Zmmul is closely comparable to the Thumb-1 ISA implemented by Cortex-M0, but I'd expect a little lower DMIPS/MHz than a Cortex-M0.
hn_submit 1 hours ago [-]
These are more than sufficient for simple control applications. I'm just wondering if I can run a small GUI on it driving an OLED display. That's what I'm gonna find out.
myrmidon 5 hours ago [-]
Such development boards are a completeley different thing compared to RVA23-profile RISC-V CPUs.
This is like comparing an 48MHz ARM-Cortex-M0 with the CPU in your Macbook. Yes both of them are ARM cores, but the small embedded processor has very little RAM/Flash/clockspeed, no memory management unit, no cache, no modern RAM interface.
Not even the instruction set is really the same, because you (typically) won't even have floating point instructions/registers on the small MCUs, much less vector instructions.
The Milk-V Jupiter 2 mentioned in the post is basically a full-fledged Desktop CPU and it's price is not gonna be anywhere close to $2 either...
asdfsa32 7 hours ago [-]
Who actually builds these manufacturing facilities? Is America just a financial services empire now? Two can play this game.
5 hours ago [-]
ShadowOfThePit 8 hours ago [-]
> A machine expected to run for 15 years should not depend on one company's roadmap, or one government's decisions."
> A machine that runs for 15 years needs software that can be maintained for 15 years.
I don't quite understand. Has this been a problem for industrial machines? Can't they already run for 30 years and more?
What exactly is this initiative looking to fix and improve? Besides of the basic idea of FOSS being good, and whatever.
InvisibleUp 7 hours ago [-]
They can run, but if one of the computer-related parts breaks down your only choice is scrounging eBay for replacement parts because (as an example) the software is proprietary and it runs on a weird MCA card with really precise timing and strong anti-piracy measures.
rurifi33 8 hours ago [-]
In the 90s and early 2000s server uptime might be counted in multiple years and extremes in the decades
The industry can barely keep an npm update from breaking the world now.. and that’s build tools and environments and so it’s independent of “we use stable languages”
Now add the possibility of political sanctions on ISA licensing and you have -
Hardware that’s fails quicker and may not be available to buy, software that barely builds months later, and a world where the US president can sanction entities at will if they don’t comply…
Yeah, open source isn’t all that’s required
jurgenburgen 2 hours ago [-]
> In the 90s and early 2000s server uptime might be counted in multiple years and extremes in the decades
I know uptimes were a flex back in the day but now a long uptime is an indicator that maybe you’re treating your machine as a pet instead of cattle.
renszarv 7 hours ago [-]
I do remember a Freebsd 2.2 server, that after it's setup in 98, reached 800 days of uptime without any kernel upgrade, but the main reason for that, we were too afraid to do an upgrade, let alone a reboot, because if the server hadn't started, getting to it physically with a new boot CD, would have been a big issue. And that was the single server that the company had at that time, for a long time :)
7 hours ago [-]
clarionbell 6 hours ago [-]
And the chips will be manufactured in China. Truly a genius move.
Havoc 6 hours ago [-]
Neat. This seems like exactly the sort of thing Europe should be pushing
perarneng 8 hours ago [-]
CPEU is coming! I love RISC-V and have been following its progress for so long. I hope it gets more and more adoption in the world for desktops and servers. Its already massive in MCU's but we need it everywhere. Open ISA is the best ISA
vaylian 8 hours ago [-]
What is CPEU? I don't see that acronym on the page.
rurifi33 8 hours ago [-]
Probably a nice merge of CPU and EU
geodel 11 minutes ago [-]
Ah okay, I was thinking something like Central Processing Embedded Units.
perarneng 6 hours ago [-]
Just something I made up when promoting that EU should make CPU's . So its exactly what you say a merge of CPU and EU :-)
jabl 8 hours ago [-]
Google says it's "CPEU most commonly stands for Continuing Professional Education Unit, a credit system used by dietitians and nutrition professionals.". Yeah, not sure how that is related to RISC-V. Perhaps we should eat RISC-V powered nanobots to, uh, future sci-fi something?
Why a SpaceMiT and not a Cortus, Codasip, or anything European? (I think there are also other companies also trying to sell their IP that could be more innovative)
ymz5 3 hours ago [-]
Would be happy to port the stack to a RVA23-capable system from Cortus, Codasip or any other European firm! Once the board is available, of course.
dadoum 2 hours ago [-]
Cool, I also hope one gets available too, I would love seeing some competition.
hollowonepl 8 hours ago [-]
I like RISC-V as a concept but still only Chinese are focused on manufacturing those today.
So.. it's a bit funny to read there is an European Initiative... to promote Chinese computer appliances.
In times when fridges with Chinese electronics that are phoning home become more hack-able today than ever..
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
That goes to show how low the things have gone with the US administration.
In fact several countries do support Huawei store in addition to Apple and Google ones, including having the usual bank apps available there.
Soon, there will be vibe fabricated chips in our computers and machines. Can't wait for coming hardware revolution.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
Fair enough, however being vibe coded is all the rage nowadays.
csmantle 7 hours ago [-]
It's interesting to see that both "Firefly AIBOX-K3" and "Milk-V Jupiter2" use cores from SpacemiT, a Chinese company. It's even listed as the "Reference stack" that is "Defined together, verified together"!
> Hardware
> RVA23 SoC with IOMMU
> SpacemiT K3
> 8× X100 cores, hypervisor extension, IOMMU
hollowonepl 5 hours ago [-]
That’s the question I’m asking. Where is Siemens and Bosch these days… all I see is China is playing to get through EU compliance to ensure more phoning home from
Industry 4.0 appliances. Meh.
And no, I’m not American, nor I think Americans can be trusted more these days in the race of global surveillance programs.
But having open, patent free standards is noble. I love the idea.
GoblinSlayer 7 hours ago [-]
There's glorious open hardware rpi pico 2.
hollowonepl 6 hours ago [-]
I think you misunderstood. I’m happy to buy RISC-V computer but from a vendor that I can trust I don’t need to place in DMZ or I see funny traffic on the routers
GoblinSlayer 4 hours ago [-]
I don't understand. You will trust it only if you make it yourself?
blitzar 6 hours ago [-]
RISC architecture's going to change everything.
usrnm 6 hours ago [-]
RISC architecture is about as old as x86
wvbdmp 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, RISC is good.
dcreater 10 hours ago [-]
Vibe coded site and copy
soltanov 10 hours ago [-]
i am tired of seeing same patterns and designs on Internet. It is kind of frustration
minetest2048 8 hours ago [-]
And also real life.. there's no reason why a laundromat, barbershop and Japanese restaurant have posters that looks similar
soltanov 8 hours ago [-]
Agree, all of them in same industry mostly have similar posters. My eyes keep ignoring them and focus on service quality of barbershop and restaurants.
anonzzzies 10 hours ago [-]
By now I just want everything just to be black on white or white on black text and nothing else. Or better, just an md file.
dcreater 10 hours ago [-]
Yet it will be worse when we aren't able to detect it as easily
exit 9 hours ago [-]
what exactly will be worse once no qualitative difference is detectible?
jsumn 8 hours ago [-]
No difference in presentation doesn't make presented slop content less sloppy.
isolli 8 hours ago [-]
Indeed:
"RVA23 silicon has arrived. The industrial computer built on it has not."
"Until recently it lacked what industrial systems need. That has changed."
So tiresome...
ShadowOfThePit 8 hours ago [-]
"The silicon is here. The industrial computer isn't yet."
"An industrial computer has to do more: survive the control cabinet, talk to the field, and stay available for a decade or longer."
Do people think this sounds good?
And what if it does, but you and I are just tired from seeing it everywhere?
isolli 4 hours ago [-]
I've been wondering the same since the scandal that hit the French literary world a couple of months ago [0]. Until a journalist (anonymously) accused the author of having written his novel with AI, literary critics and fellow writers were fawning all over the book, and the book was set to grab most of this year's literary prizes.
Then people like you and me, who read AI prose all day long, went and read the book, and we all immediately knew the book was, at the very least, heavily AI-generated. For a few tragicomic months, people were in denial, going on TV to defend his book and defiantly proclaiming that "a machine could not have written this", only exposing their insulated ignorance.
Hence the question: do we dislike this style because we read it all day long? Was it originally pleasing (it probably arose out of RLHF), but then used excessively? All while famous French writers and critics had nothing but the highest praise for the book...
Note: after the author could not prove authorship, his editor officially declared that he had, indeed, used AI to write the book [0].
Is it content-free? I don't think so. Is it hard to read? I don't think so either. Is it incorrect? I hope it's not %))
Does it sound like a typical LLM-generated text? In many areas, it does. But why would I care? This is not expected to be a piece of literary art. Equally, the pictures illustrating it are not artistic masterpieces, and aren't expected to be. And even the letters in the text are not carefully handwritten by a human but machine-generated.
Get used to it, and get past it. It's not worth the attention.
orphereus 9 hours ago [-]
Ok, buddy.
Honali 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
FrustratedMonky 15 minutes ago [-]
Little unclear.
Is this supposed to be the hardware to replace a PLC?
Or just another small form factor PC for industry, but happens to be RISC?
PowerElectronix 6 hours ago [-]
Very sad that the silicon itself is not made in EU.
orbifold 7 hours ago [-]
Pure model slop. When I read this I get a headache and feel repulsed.
asdfsa32 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, Dead internet stinks and is approaching faster than AI market collapse.
IshKebab 6 hours ago [-]
Likewise. I'm a RISC-V fan but a slop page like this is not a good look.
ur-whale 7 hours ago [-]
> European RISC-V Industrial Computing Initiative
> Based in Europe, open worldwide
So European, right?
I'm immediately thinking: there's got to be some sort of sovereign aspect to the initiative ... right?
I mean, if there's one place you want a silicon stack that wasn't manufactured in China, it's most definitely in the guts of your industrial infrastructure (assuming you still have one, yes, point taken).
But, if you look at the "The silicon is here." section and dig a little:
Wake me up when someone can actually build a computer from scratch with EU-made parts.
dadoum 3 hours ago [-]
The eProcessor TC1 is a RISC-V CPU with cores designed by Cortus (Mauguio, France) and fabricated in GlobalFoundries Dresden fab (22FDX). But that's a public initiative, not a private one.
RetroTechie 32 minutes ago [-]
Is there a cheap .dev board (assembled in EU) available for purchase by regular consumers?
lioeters 7 hours ago [-]
> build a computer from scratch
What would it take to make this possible, if not completely then at least move in the right direction?
Aside from re-thinking computer manufacturing from the ground up.. RISC-V, or something like it, seems like the right idea as part of the solution.
numpad0 6 hours ago [-]
A lot of ST made ARM chips should be more or less EU made, or at least Western made
vanviegen 6 hours ago [-]
> Wake me up when someone can actually build a computer from scratch with EU-made parts.
That may be a high bar. Would all countries in the world collaborating, except for China, Taiwan and South Korea, even be able to do this?
Honali 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
weng 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
0l 9 hours ago [-]
Yet another "initiative". I remember the European Processor Initiative that went precisely nowhere.
Not an expert, but reading the article you linked it seems it was quite stressful?
> EPI demonstrated several results just after the Phase 2 end in 2026.[11] SiPearl demonstrated the Rhea1 chip running a complete HPC software stack. The system booted on a test board, with a standard Linux distribution running with high-speed HBM memories and their associated hardware performance monitoring counters. It successfully executed the HPL and STREAM benchmarks, demonstrating the readiness of the complete Rhea1 hardware and software ecosystem for HPC workloads to power Exascale systems. Rhea1 features 80 arm® Neoverse V1 cores, more than 61 billion transistors (7.8 billion equivalent gates), built-in High Bandwidth Memory, with 4 stacks of HBM, 4 DDR5 interfaces supporting 2 DIMMs Per Channel, and 104 lanes of PCIe Gen5 interface: up to 6 x 16 lanes + 2 x 4 lanes. Rhea1 was selected for implementation in Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. The next version, Rhea2, was selected for implementation in Alice Recoque, the second European exascale supercomputer.
And then more paragraphs how work was taken forward..
snvzz 8 hours ago [-]
RISC-V is inevitable.
ex_machina 3 hours ago [-]
This cultish nonsense is one reason I've stopped taking RISC-V seriously for desktop/server usage. There are other reasons too:
- RISC-V is "open", except in none of the ways that matter to me. What I want is a well-documented platform able to run fully open software. RISC-V does not inherently provide the former and the latter has nothing to do with ISA. If anything, manufacturers seem to take GPL-licensed software, modify it then _not_ publish the modified source code.
- Lately I've started to care a lot more about minimal software stacks that are easier to prove to work as intended. Part of that includes generating raw machine code and I hate the terrible immediate encoding especially for C instructions. Compare with x86-64 where you can just write the constant straight to memory. x86-64 would actually be a nice ISA if it were not for prefixes + lack of explicit instruction length.
- It seems there is an excessive focus on hardware "simplicity" (for very small cores) while neglecting simplicity on the software side. I would benefit greatly from automatic bounds checks, checked arithmetic... and many "safe" languages would too. This "simplicity" apparently is also why the immediate encoding is so ridiculous.
cbolton 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure this quasi-religious framing does RISC-V any good.
7 hours ago [-]
jimbob45 6 hours ago [-]
Is it though? AI can rapidly push through an objectively better standard if a group becomes motivated to make one. There’s no need to marry ourselves permanently to a mediocre design like we did with C interop.
cbolton 5 hours ago [-]
By some coincidence RISC-V became successful just before/while AI took off, and I'm glad it did. The design is pretty good for low end cores and probably good enough for high end cores, so there's a chance it will become one of the dominant ISAs in the mid-term.
We're probably getting to a point where AIs will just generate optimized binaries directly, so I'd rather have them generate them in a machine language that is human friendly. RISC-V being designed by humans with a focus on simplicity is close to the best we could wish for.
mosura 4 hours ago [-]
How long do we keep RISCV going without facing that it has failed? We were supposed to be surrounded by M1 level RVA23 devices by now.
The telling thing is in benchmarks the Loongson outperforms them, by a lot.
cbolton 3 hours ago [-]
So it's late to deliver hugely complex cores according to some optimistic timeline? That's a weird measure of success. The ISA is successful in the low end and is seeing huge investment on large cores, though most of the promising companies are now focusing on AI or getting bought by large players like Qualcomm. So yeah it might take a while still before we see competitive high end consumer cores. I would still put my money on RISC-V rather than Loongson for the long term but we'll see.
kjs3 57 minutes ago [-]
That's a weird measure of success.
It's a far better measure than "despite all the years of unfulfilled hype and promises we'll absolutely have a smorgasbord of performant RISC-V cores Real Soon Now". Single core performance down in the Intel Core range? Needs 96 cores to even be competitive on a handful of benchmarks that don't equal a modern users compute needs? The competition isn't sitting on their hands, and RISC-V hasn't delivered the performance it's fanbois have told us is 'inevitable'. Loongson has at least managed late-2010s levels of performance.
Maybe RISC-V will completely take over the embedded market. That's not a bad gig. High volume, tho slim margins, lot's of niches for lots of innovation (want to continue to go crazy with ISA extension? Not a big deal in the embedded world). But they're still selling billions of 8051s, ARM is ubiquitous but even they didn't take over that world, and I know how I would lay my bets there, too.
cbolton 27 minutes ago [-]
That's using he most enthusiastic fanboy predictions as the baseline by which to judge success, not a recipe for reaching the right conclusions.
I'd rather look at all the data available. If you want to compare to Loongson, you have to include the 20 years head start that this company has in developing microarchitectures, a big part of which can be transferred to the Loongson designs. And factor in the strategic investments in China who doesn't want to depend on ARM and x86, while in the Western world people were happy with x86 and ARM and big money is mostly flowing to AI chips, where RISC-V is successful.
Then there is Xiangshan Kunminghu... For some reason the most powerful open source CPU is RISC-V. Chinese and not Loongson.
mosura 9 minutes ago [-]
> I'd rather look at all the data available
There is no data to suggest RISCV can ever be competitive in the large core space. The longer this absence goes on (now approaching 15 years) the more evidence there is that it is structurally incapable of competitive implementations.
If you wanted to create a project to distract a whole generation of computer architects from getting anywhere this is exactly what it would look like.
dragonelite 2 hours ago [-]
It makes sense for the Chinese to make Loongson be performant, its an ISA they fully control and only have to do with domestic Loongson standard body politics instead of having to deal with global Politics in the RISC-V standard bodies.
imtringued 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't it a bit hasty to say this, when one of the more powerful RISC-V CPU cores (Ascalon) hasn't been taped out yet?
kjs3 45 minutes ago [-]
No, it's not hasty to say that a processor that I can buy and benchmark today outperforms a processor that hasn't even been taped out.
mosura 2 hours ago [-]
This stuff has all been six months away for years now.
At some point we have to accept it isn’t happening.
About ERICI
ERICI is a non-commercial initiative in its founding phase. It is not yet a legal entity, sells nothing and charges no fees.
(https://erici.eu/impressum.html)
The random dude is not looking for funding.
it means not intended with the purpose to make money from it
founding doesn't always imply. a startup-like process of selling stock (or similar) to investors which in turn want some profit from it long term
it can also mean looking for donations to found a project, i.e. cover it's costs
I hope that leading European industrial computer manufacturers notice the initiative and join -- or at least start evaluating the possibility to use RVA23 SoCs in their devices. Yes, currently only Chinese vendors can provide such chips, but the world is changing fast.
What's missing here is the "made in Europe" bit. Currently (very few exceptions), RISC-V SoCs are designed by Chinese companies, maybe fabricated in Taiwan, and boards they go on manufactured in China.
Imho that is what Europe needs to address. With EU-made boards available, the software side is the easy part.
There is some European CPU initiative. Sounds great but where are the boards?
Great idea, but if the important EU players aren't there, what's the point?
I just purchased a boatload of Chinese RISC-V development boards for about $2.30 a piece. Can't wait to start playing with them.
"RISC(-V) architecture is going to change everything."
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005011967676963.html
My point would be that it has already been demonstrated that you can lose access to ARM technology as a consequence of US sanctions.
ARM is not a sufficiently independent ISA to guarantee sovereignty.
With RISC-V, you may lose access to a specific core, chip, or supply chain. But your ecosystem can pivot to an alternative. Long-term, you have the option of complete in-sourcing.
So, even working with Chinese chips and boards today can be progress, as long as more domestic RVA23 options can be expected to arrive later.
What's important in the context of a European "sovereign computing" initiative is the licensing of the instruction set architecture. Like x86, ARM is still proprietary, while RISC-V is a free and open standard.
Saudi Arabia did recently invest 45 billion dollars in the vision fund which is an investment fund managed by Softbank but they haven't really invested within Softbank itself so not it is not mostly owned by Saudis from what the data can tell.
Even though it's Japanese-owned most of their R&D still takes place in England.
I know that sometimes "European" is used as a synonym for "in the EU", but most of the time this is sloppy. Nobody in Europe thinks UK is "not European".
RISC-V is IP UNlocked. I bought RISC-V mini-boards (so cheap) years ago because I was planning to build my keyboard... but I am still on other projects... and there are even better RISC-V miniboard nowdays (better USB, more GPIOs... for a full fledge BFO-9000 keyboard!).
What I am waiting for are RISC-V high performance micro-architectures which will use the best silicon node (desktop, mobile, and for servers it seems there are a few attempts). One of the main issue seems... the compressed instructions which should be removed as it increases implementation complexity significantly in order to apply some of the known high-performance optimizations (it is not anectodale if ARM removed thumb machine instructions).
I like the idea, I code as much as possible things in RISC-V assembly now, and re-use a ton of code paths (at the assembly level!). I have even written a small RISC-V interpreter for x86_64 for static exes.
All they want is to suck on the government's tit.
8k RAM, 64k ROM, compressed RISC-V insn set.
Edit: Apparently it's a QingKe RISC-V with about 130 Coremark.
This is like comparing an 48MHz ARM-Cortex-M0 with the CPU in your Macbook. Yes both of them are ARM cores, but the small embedded processor has very little RAM/Flash/clockspeed, no memory management unit, no cache, no modern RAM interface.
Not even the instruction set is really the same, because you (typically) won't even have floating point instructions/registers on the small MCUs, much less vector instructions.
The Milk-V Jupiter 2 mentioned in the post is basically a full-fledged Desktop CPU and it's price is not gonna be anywhere close to $2 either...
> A machine that runs for 15 years needs software that can be maintained for 15 years.
I don't quite understand. Has this been a problem for industrial machines? Can't they already run for 30 years and more?
What exactly is this initiative looking to fix and improve? Besides of the basic idea of FOSS being good, and whatever.
The industry can barely keep an npm update from breaking the world now.. and that’s build tools and environments and so it’s independent of “we use stable languages”
Now add the possibility of political sanctions on ISA licensing and you have -
Hardware that’s fails quicker and may not be available to buy, software that barely builds months later, and a world where the US president can sanction entities at will if they don’t comply…
Yeah, open source isn’t all that’s required
I know uptimes were a flex back in the day but now a long uptime is an indicator that maybe you’re treating your machine as a pet instead of cattle.
So.. it's a bit funny to read there is an European Initiative... to promote Chinese computer appliances.
In times when fridges with Chinese electronics that are phoning home become more hack-able today than ever..
In fact several countries do support Huawei store in addition to Apple and Google ones, including having the usual bank apps available there.
https://consumer.huawei.com/pt/offer
https://consumer.huawei.com/pt/campanhas/appgallery
As others ITT have pointed out, this is a vibecoded site from one guy lol
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50349860
> Hardware
> RVA23 SoC with IOMMU
> SpacemiT K3
> 8× X100 cores, hypervisor extension, IOMMU
And no, I’m not American, nor I think Americans can be trusted more these days in the race of global surveillance programs.
But having open, patent free standards is noble. I love the idea.
"RVA23 silicon has arrived. The industrial computer built on it has not."
"Until recently it lacked what industrial systems need. That has changed."
So tiresome...
"An industrial computer has to do more: survive the control cabinet, talk to the field, and stay available for a decade or longer."
Do people think this sounds good?
And what if it does, but you and I are just tired from seeing it everywhere?
Then people like you and me, who read AI prose all day long, went and read the book, and we all immediately knew the book was, at the very least, heavily AI-generated. For a few tragicomic months, people were in denial, going on TV to defend his book and defiantly proclaiming that "a machine could not have written this", only exposing their insulated ignorance.
Hence the question: do we dislike this style because we read it all day long? Was it originally pleasing (it probably arose out of RLHF), but then used excessively? All while famous French writers and critics had nothing but the highest praise for the book...
Note: after the author could not prove authorship, his editor officially declared that he had, indeed, used AI to write the book [0].
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...
Does it sound like a typical LLM-generated text? In many areas, it does. But why would I care? This is not expected to be a piece of literary art. Equally, the pictures illustrating it are not artistic masterpieces, and aren't expected to be. And even the letters in the text are not carefully handwritten by a human but machine-generated.
Get used to it, and get past it. It's not worth the attention.
Is this supposed to be the hardware to replace a PLC?
Or just another small form factor PC for industry, but happens to be RISC?
So European, right?
I'm immediately thinking: there's got to be some sort of sovereign aspect to the initiative ... right?
I mean, if there's one place you want a silicon stack that wasn't manufactured in China, it's most definitely in the guts of your industrial infrastructure (assuming you still have one, yes, point taken).
But, if you look at the "The silicon is here." section and dig a little:
> "Shenzhen MilkV Technology Co., Ltd" [1]
[1]: https://milkv.io/about
Wake me up when someone can actually build a computer from scratch with EU-made parts.
What would it take to make this possible, if not completely then at least move in the right direction?
Aside from re-thinking computer manufacturing from the ground up.. RISC-V, or something like it, seems like the right idea as part of the solution.
That may be a high bar. Would all countries in the world collaborating, except for China, Taiwan and South Korea, even be able to do this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Processor_Initiative
> EPI demonstrated several results just after the Phase 2 end in 2026.[11] SiPearl demonstrated the Rhea1 chip running a complete HPC software stack. The system booted on a test board, with a standard Linux distribution running with high-speed HBM memories and their associated hardware performance monitoring counters. It successfully executed the HPL and STREAM benchmarks, demonstrating the readiness of the complete Rhea1 hardware and software ecosystem for HPC workloads to power Exascale systems. Rhea1 features 80 arm® Neoverse V1 cores, more than 61 billion transistors (7.8 billion equivalent gates), built-in High Bandwidth Memory, with 4 stacks of HBM, 4 DDR5 interfaces supporting 2 DIMMs Per Channel, and 104 lanes of PCIe Gen5 interface: up to 6 x 16 lanes + 2 x 4 lanes. Rhea1 was selected for implementation in Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. The next version, Rhea2, was selected for implementation in Alice Recoque, the second European exascale supercomputer.
And then more paragraphs how work was taken forward..
- RISC-V is "open", except in none of the ways that matter to me. What I want is a well-documented platform able to run fully open software. RISC-V does not inherently provide the former and the latter has nothing to do with ISA. If anything, manufacturers seem to take GPL-licensed software, modify it then _not_ publish the modified source code.
- Lately I've started to care a lot more about minimal software stacks that are easier to prove to work as intended. Part of that includes generating raw machine code and I hate the terrible immediate encoding especially for C instructions. Compare with x86-64 where you can just write the constant straight to memory. x86-64 would actually be a nice ISA if it were not for prefixes + lack of explicit instruction length.
- It seems there is an excessive focus on hardware "simplicity" (for very small cores) while neglecting simplicity on the software side. I would benefit greatly from automatic bounds checks, checked arithmetic... and many "safe" languages would too. This "simplicity" apparently is also why the immediate encoding is so ridiculous.
We're probably getting to a point where AIs will just generate optimized binaries directly, so I'd rather have them generate them in a machine language that is human friendly. RISC-V being designed by humans with a focus on simplicity is close to the best we could wish for.
The telling thing is in benchmarks the Loongson outperforms them, by a lot.
It's a far better measure than "despite all the years of unfulfilled hype and promises we'll absolutely have a smorgasbord of performant RISC-V cores Real Soon Now". Single core performance down in the Intel Core range? Needs 96 cores to even be competitive on a handful of benchmarks that don't equal a modern users compute needs? The competition isn't sitting on their hands, and RISC-V hasn't delivered the performance it's fanbois have told us is 'inevitable'. Loongson has at least managed late-2010s levels of performance.
Maybe RISC-V will completely take over the embedded market. That's not a bad gig. High volume, tho slim margins, lot's of niches for lots of innovation (want to continue to go crazy with ISA extension? Not a big deal in the embedded world). But they're still selling billions of 8051s, ARM is ubiquitous but even they didn't take over that world, and I know how I would lay my bets there, too.
I'd rather look at all the data available. If you want to compare to Loongson, you have to include the 20 years head start that this company has in developing microarchitectures, a big part of which can be transferred to the Loongson designs. And factor in the strategic investments in China who doesn't want to depend on ARM and x86, while in the Western world people were happy with x86 and ARM and big money is mostly flowing to AI chips, where RISC-V is successful.
Then there is Xiangshan Kunminghu... For some reason the most powerful open source CPU is RISC-V. Chinese and not Loongson.
There is no data to suggest RISCV can ever be competitive in the large core space. The longer this absence goes on (now approaching 15 years) the more evidence there is that it is structurally incapable of competitive implementations.
If you wanted to create a project to distract a whole generation of computer architects from getting anywhere this is exactly what it would look like.
At some point we have to accept it isn’t happening.