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Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

theregister.com

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Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#101

Post by 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?

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#102

Post by duskwuff »

throwaway888abc wrote: post #8

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...

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.

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#103

Post by zipy124 »

matt-p wrote: post #50
6SixTy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

ARM is a British company. We are in Europe.

It was founded in Britain, but it is a Japanese company ATM as per it's SoftBank ownership.

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#104

Post by akie »

ratatoskrt wrote: post #67
dgellow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is it. China might be authoritarian, but it's acting way less eratic than the US right now.

The US is not just erratic, it wouldn't be a stretch to call them hostile towards the EU right now.

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#105

Post by XorNot »

kibwen wrote: post #84
bruce511 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A benevolent dictator is the best form of government. Unfortunately though power corrupts and they have a habit of becoming self serving, and very much not benevolent. I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach. Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-…

> So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done. There are also obviously bad dictatorships. All dictatorships, by definition, are better at getting things done than organizations that require non-unilateral assent. Instead, the difference between a good dictatorship and a bad dictatorship is that in a good dictatorship, dissidents are eliminated quietly or, if not quietly, then…

Also you can look at the history of the Nazis and it becomes apparent that they weren't good at much of anything except that: so successfully that "efficient Nazis" became a trope for decades after the war despite all the evidence lying around to the contrary.

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#106

Post by XorNot »

hulitu wrote: post #59
tux1968 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

Wouldn't this be ideal though? Emulate the processor we'd like to have and work backwards to see if it can be built?

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#107

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

regularjack wrote: post #88
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

By negotiated peace you mean taking the agressor's side?

I mean a negotiated peace. The alternative is a drawn out conflict that either wipes out Ukraine’s male population or significantly weakens the economies of Europe and America or both. Avoiding those things is taking the side of Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans. Does it mean a dictator (Putin) gets some land? Sure. But I don’t think that’s the reason to seek peace.

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#108

Post by ebalit »

bruce511 wrote: post #64
f1shy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there “good” dictatorships? My personal opinion is there is no good dictator (ok, in HN context, BDFL in a SW project) I like no totalitarian regime. No one.

A benevolent dictator is the best form of government. Unfortunately though power corrupts and they have a habit of becoming self serving, and very much not benevolent. I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach. Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-…

The analogy between projects/companies and governments is missing big components though.

- "Benevolent Dictators" of companies or projects have to obey the law - They can't forbid competition or alternatives - Every participant can leave at any time - If they burn the organization to the ground, the worst case scenario is the organization get replaced and people move on

I think it shows that we're using the word "dictator" way too casually in that case.

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#109

Post by omnimus »

XorNot wrote: post #99
happymellon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't the supplier of lithography machines for TSMC Dutch? 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.

Manufacturing the processor itself is different issue from what architecture that processor will be. If Europe produces any consumer processors like that it wont be x86. It will be Risc-V (maybe arm? its UK but owned by Softbank so nope)

Re: Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

#110

Post by piokoch »

dgellow wrote: post #41
briandear wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Yup, relying on sadistic, communistic regime that puts people into concentration camps is a great idea! What can go wrong!? For instance trading with Russia, Nord Stream, didn't have any bad results...

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).

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