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.
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.
"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?
I read the sentence as the US is the nefarious one, putting pressure between two groups to not work together. It’s only natural for China to act in its own self interest.
"Ask HN: How much would it cost to build a RISC CPU out of carbon?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41153490 with nanoimprinting (which 10x's current gen nanolithography FWIU)
> Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.
I've always thought of 'continental Europe' as meaning 'mainland Europe'. In other words excluding the disconnected parts like the UK. Regardless, the UK is in Europe.
The EU was established in 1993. Arm was founded in 1990.
For that matter the UK is composed of islands and parts thereof and nothing in "continental Europe", a term which refers to just the contiguous landmass. (Gibraltar is owned by the UK, but not part of it.)
Luckily Europe is not defined by the EU or sea levels, and the UK is very much in Europe the continent.
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.
That may be in part to their 'president for life'. Leaders are not immortal though and transitions between them have seen large and sometimes catastrophic changes. China designed its modern political system to avoid that, only for Xi to undo it and purge younger potential challengers.
For life and is 71 in arguably the most stressful job in the world. The risk of mental decline cannot be ignored, particularly as he has now served longer than any US president in all of history.
Although I say that and then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find which individual had the longest tenure of presidency and vice presidency combined. It seems like it’s either Nixon, HW Bush, or Biden.
If not exactly hostile then definetly untrustworthy, they certainly show that they are willing to blackmail their partners. No one can be surprised that others want to get rid of influence over critical products. I strongly support it.
It's like with russian gas once again, even the root of the problem is the same.
One man with infinite power and no accountability for his actions.
Just for clarification. I don't blame Americans, but at least from my perspective, this electoral system is very radical and gives almost "absolute power" to a person or party that almost always has marginally more support. You do not need to compromise by creating coalitions etc.
In the end, it is the fault of us Europeans who blindly believed that any successful candidate would be in our favour and perceived as friendly. Although everyone understands how fragile elections are, this was naively ignored.
"right now" being the key phrase here. On what length of time due you judge stability? The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine. The question is if the institutions that produced USA can hold. China on the other hand lacks the self correcting mechanisms that USA has built in.
China has a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. The interesting thing is that many regions of the globe have a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. Europe had major continent-wide cataclysms with WW1/2 in the 1900s; the Wars of Religion in the early 1600s; and the Hundred Years War + Black Death + Mongol Conquests in the 1300s. The Holy Roman Empire lasted from about 900 AD to around 1300 AD. The Roman Republic lasted about 500 years; the Roman Empire lasted another 400-500.
I think the logic might be that China just had their civilization-ending cataclysm, and so they're on the upswing now. Ditto Europe. This is probably not the end of the United States either, more like the Crisis of the 3rd Century. But it's just as logical to look back on the 400-year cycle and think "Better invest in the countries that have already had their crisis and dealt with it than ones that are starting to decay internally" than to look back on the last 75 years and think "Wow, that was chaotic, the next 75 years will be equally chaotic."
I'm not disagreeing - I think it's important to see China as the undemocratic, illiberal, authoritarian regime that it is. And it is foolish to think that China is interested in a rule-based world order because they believe in the same values many key post-war figures in Europe and the US believed in.
It's that China's economy is heavily dependent on exports - and dependability and the appearance of stability is generally good for trade. Obviously, this is helped by political stability, which means less scope for the kind of outward-facing destructive populisms we see in the US or parts of Europe. But with China's economy in trouble, that might very well change.
> The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine.
Such an event is also one reason India got my grandparent's generation to leave.
And the one about 175 years ago in Ireland probably contributed to both the (eventual) Irish home rule movement and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
While the Great Leap Forward's famine was avoidable in theory, I think that the historical examples of so many others having similar experiences during the transition from agrarian to industrial, shows that in practice the mistakes are very easy to fall into.
I sincerely doubt much is left of those self-correcting mechanism in the US. They are being deconstructed at high pace currently, and not even in secret, and apart from a delay by a judge here and there, it's crickets.
We will see what man made disasters the current (and future) US adminstration will cause. By every measure it looks like they are determined to find out the hard way.
It would be a mistake to work with China for several reasons.
The EU needs to be in a position where it can decide what is best for Europeans and not be strong-armed or overly dependent on allies that clearly don't share the same concern.
It took 3 months for the US to shift from actively supporting Ukraine’s defense to actively undermining it. China is more ambiguous, with a neutral stance, the US is now actively going against Ukraine and Europe’s interests by siding with Putin.
So if you have a choice between a schizophrenic, antagonistic US, and a China who doesn’t care much about human rights but wants to keep stable international trade relationships, I’m really not shocked if you pick the later
Most authoritarian states are 'stable and predictable'. When you meet a lion on the savannah the beast is stable and predictable in that it will most likely try to eat you unless it isn't hungry. Step on a snake and the outcome is stable and predictable in that you will get bitten.
It is good for Europe to learn to stand on its - our - own legs, to become less dependent on the USA for territorial defence and probably also to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule. Si vis pacem, para bellum. It is not good for Europe to swap dependence on the USA with dependence on China, we're more than 500 million people with access to most of the resources we need to stand on our own legs so let's get crackin'.
Also, let's drop the silly panic around Trump, the man is doing what he was elected to do which is put America first. We should do the same, in a serious way. Not in an isolationist way but sensibly. Stop importing the world's problems, stop with the silly self-chastisement around 'climate' and 'colonialism', stop the import of islamism and make serious work of getting rid of the islamist factions which have been allowed to establish themselves or Europe as it once was - the birthplace of the enlightenment - will succumb to the sectarian infighting which destroyed Lebanon after they invited Arafat and his PLO.
So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
[1] Fascism and Communism are closely related so it is not that odd to call the current government form in China by the former name even if they claim to be the latter. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism for a definition or read what Mussolini had to say about the subject and you'll see the parallels.
You're going well off-topic here and into inflammatory territory. This whole debate should probably best happen somewhere else.
But just one thing: while I personally share your take on the political and societal issues, I do think it's unfortunate that you lump "climate" in there, in scare quotes. The climate issue is informed by hard science. America's tendency to politicize everything will have terrible outcomes if climate gets completely caught up in the culture war. Whatever we think about the solutions, we have to find a way to agree that this particular problem is bad and needs to be addressed urgently.
Still, again, here is not the best place for this whole discussion.
For secular and democratic nations, multiculturalism isn’t inherently dangerous if there are principles and ideals around which newcomers to any nation can assimilate and integrate. America attempted that to some degree of success with its melting pot ideals till the 90s, but there wasn’t enough emphasis on civic duty, from either the commoners or the elite. The US founding fathers included everyone in their vision, btw, including Muslims. The failure in any integration and assimilation goals from the past few decades result from enabling unjust narratives which pose America as the only country with the social ills and issues it’s being criticized of, when there isn’t any other country in recent memory with a more socially diverse congress.
> It is good for Europe ... to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule
I don't know if you're being serious here, but this (Ameri-centric? C21-centric?) view is laughable. Europe is well-acquainted with war and never saw lasting peace for much of it's history until the second half of the 20th century.
> Europe ... saw lasting peace [in] the second half of the 20th century.
Which happens to coincide with the lifetime of the majority of Europeans. War was mostly something which happened to other countries, in other places - not in 'civilised' Europe, surely?
So yes, I am being serious - deadly serious. Most European countries neglected national defence after the fall of the Soviet Union in the expectation that Fukuyama was right when he claimed we were at 'The end of History' [1]. There is a good Swedish term for this condition: fredsskadad which translates to 'peace-damaged', the opposite of 'war-damaged'. It is the condition of a people who have gotten so used to peace being the norm that they assume that everyone everywhere else also considers peace to be the goal and thus no longer need to consider the possibility of ending up in a conflict.
> So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
Predictable to an extent. President Xi has effected a number of rather drastic changes internally; it's possible that external policy changes may follow.
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).
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.
Most of the machines for the rest of the process also come out of Europe. Building the factories wouldn't be all that hard. Actually developing and running a full production sub-10nm process is a different beast entirely.
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)
Just because SoftBank own it now, do you really think if Europe went to it and said "can we buy half, if so we'll buy $X amount of licences otherwise we'll start (effectively) a serious competitor in risc-v.
STmicro is producing chips at around 14-18nm. ASML is the one producing the leading lithography machine, and we are not talking about ARM, Infineon or NXP. Europe has the capacity to produce their own processors if needed.
ARM is owned by SoftBank, and you need to deal with them for licensing. While SoftBank is not based in the US, the amount they have invested in the US and US based companies means they are very coupled with US. Investing in ARM technology would have a stronger coupling than investing in RISC V.
This wouldn’t be true if Europe was more willing to abandon international copyright laws, but given the amount of IP they own they are unlikely to.
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.
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.
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.
It is what it is, IF the USA is now europe's enemy, and aligning with Russia (cutting off ukraine from satellites, disabling F16s, hummilaiting the leader in press confrences, calling him a dictator in the press and JD calling us "random countries that haven't fought a war in 30 years" are all indicating that's true).
We will forced to look for other friends, I'm not sure we have the luxury of complete ideological alignment, instead a pragmatic but considered strategic approach shall have to do. I for one think we've bigger fish to fry, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" and all that.
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.
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
Well. I have worked quite a bit with Chinese businesses and let's just put like this: It does not matter much whatever license you think the SW or HW has. Whatever is available will be used and modified to the liking of the customer.
It is common for new employees to walk in with code bases of previous projects they have worked with and there is a great deal of administration involved in ensuring that no one else gets to work with more code than they absolutely need. Local builds and copying binary archives is common practice!
> It does not matter much whatever license you think the SW or HW has. Whatever is available will be used and modified to the liking of the customer.
yeah, china is just not playing the stupid licensing and copyright game. chinese companies infringe trademarks and break licenses all the time. doing so boosts their business/economy overall so the state just doesn't bother with enforcing anything.
the annoying thing is that we're not really playing the game either, or at least, we have laws that get enforced "randomly". it was recent news that meta torrented some 80 terabytes of stuff (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...) and essentially nothing happened. back in the day aaron schwartz was driven to suicide over a way smaller chunk of scientific papers downloaded.
I hate to break it to you but it’s extremely common for Western employees to do the same. I had to investigate what seemed like a new employee attempting to begin an exfil of our source code only to discover what looked like all of EMC’s core code, the new employee’s last employer, in a gdrive folder.
Again, if it’s open source there’s nothing illegal in it.
The point of closed source is that it allows the people doing the research and engineering to recoup and profit off their investments.
Which I’m in favor of.
However, considering currently the disproportionately overwhelming majority of the value is being captured by American firms, and the US has proven to be an unreliable partner, it’s in both the EU and China’s interests to eliminate the profit from this industry entirely in order to promote competitiveness with the US based front runners.
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.
I'm very impressed and fascinated by the Chinese society and their progress. I love the country and it's rich history. But is it a democracy? No not according to my idea of what that word means.
It's a great country nonetheless, people are free in China, they have their own system and it works for them, good! Why pretend it's a democracy?
The Chinese would say the point of democracy is to translate the will of the people into action, it's to efficiently solve problems that people have, it's in their understanding neither liberal nor representative. In fact they'd likely turn your question around, if democracy is merely a set of procedures or rituals without concerns for the will of the majority, the demos which is in the name, why do you pretend to be one?
Deciding the best course of action in the interest of others is different from letting go of power and allowing people to collectively make decisions that might go against your own view of what is in their best interest. Without making a judgement I'd call the latter democracy but not the first.
In this distinction there were no references to procedures or rituals, so it cannot only be a question of that.
Friends is a big word, the EU has a vested interest in getting cheap gas from as many sources as possible at this point and a direct oil and gas pipeline to Europe would definitely be helpful.
Russian presence in Syria prevented this but they're gone now.
In the future we can balance Russian cheap gas with Qatari cheap gas to not be held hostage by either party.
It would be a mistake to build dependencies on China when it's possible to avoid having dependencies at all.
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.
"MAGA" voted in the manchurian candidate. Dismantling oversight, accountability, throwing out old alliances and siding with the global aggressors. The US government is rapidly turning into a kleptocracy.
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-locked congresses) which preport to "represent the people" but just turn into "nothing gets done" factories.
So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done.
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.
> 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 with enough spin that everyone considers their elimination to be a good thing.
In other words, what good dictatorships are good at is PR.
How is a dictatorship different from a monarchy? There have been plenty of good monarchies throughout history. Frederick The Great, created the Prussian State. Stuart’s were well loved that they ended parliamentary democracy to restore the Stuarts. Victorian, Elizabethan era were also prosperous and well known. Ceasar was the final monarch who united the enmity between the nobles and plebs.
The problem is we look at those states and all we see is the existence of slavery (that existed in all societies till at least 1800AD), women being relegated to a different social role etc. But it is wrong to assume that any of those were due to monarchy and that a monarchy in the modern age would not rule based on modern values. Just look at Singapore, for a small example of a monarchy ruling based on current social mores. Unfortunately since WW1, monarchies throughout the world have vanished, and all we have are liberal democracies, so we can’t say either way.
I'm going to assume that you're speaking of monarchies in which the monarch is the actual ruler, rather than UK, Belgium, the Netherlands or Canada for instance, right?
In that case, I'd say that a monarchy is essentially dictatorship + a (usually) clear line of succession.
Xi is not all powerful; no one person is. The state is powerful, not an individual. And all states are ultimately authoritarian. The only question is what form and to what end.
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.
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.
Thank you! I've been waiting for a viable RVV board for a long time. Just ordered the OrangePi RV2.
This unblocks me properly working to optimize for vector support in software. OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
Yes, I know I could use qemu, but it's not the same. I feel like this is what unblocks me on the software side.
> OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
The problem is that there are some things in RVV where it's unclear how they will perform on high perf OoO cores:
* general choice of LMUL: on in-order cores it's clear that maximizing LMUL without spilling is the best approach, for OoO this isn't clear.
* How will LMUL>1 vrgather and vcompress perform?
* How high is the impact of vsetvli instructions? Is it worth trying to move them outside of loops whenever possible, or is the impact minimal like in the current in-order implementations.
* What is the overhead of using .vx instruction variants, is there additional cost involved in moving between GPRs and vector registers?
* Is there additional overhead when reinterpreting vector masks?
* What performance can we expect from the more complex load/stores, especially the segmented ones.
"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.
I'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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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?
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
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.
I 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
> 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.
(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
I 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).
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.
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.
“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”
ARM Holdings is British. Anyone making ARM cores (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon’s Graviton…) is paying licensing fees to a British company.
Arm even tried to cancel Qualcomm’s licensing agreement back in the fall. Using RISC V entirely circumvents not only royalty payments, but legal battles like that (frivolous or not).
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?
I think we should definitely invest in RISC-V, open is preferable, especially in a continent-wide initiative. I’m just contesting that the US could unilaterally sabotage ARM use in Europe.
RISC-V is probably no different than ARM at it's core. Also, both of them are RISC ISAs.
Right now, you are far more likely to use RISC-V and not know it than to knowingly interact with RISC-V directly. For example, since about 2015, Nvidia has used RISC-V as an onboard controller for their GPUs.
Western Digital also announced they were looking (have already?) to move to RISC-V.
If you manufacture items at scale, getting away from ARM licensing costs per unit makes financial sense. Especially if you already have in-house expertise who can design chips tuned to your specific requirements.
Both 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.
That'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.
I'm not native English speaker but I think that the current and near situation in local Carrefour would be influenced by “abandoned” rather than “abandoning”.
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
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.
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.
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.
China to publish policy to boost RISC-V chip use nationwide, sources say https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-publish-policy-boos...