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”
The USA pressures Japan to stop selling licences to European Fabs? Why, what would push them to such extremes?
Fabs can still produce those current designs (they just don't have licences). Now Europe can buy SoftBank out, or Britain can just walk into ARM Cambridge and say it's been sequested for the war effort.
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.
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.