ARM is a UK-based company. If they hadn’t dropped out of EU, it’s possible they would have settled on an ARM-based supercomputer design.
Chalk it up to another WIN for Brexit!
ARM was bought by the Japanese, it’s no longer European. RISC-V is the future.
Not just by the Japanese but by Softbank and Son Masayoshi, the guy now doing buddy-buddy photo ops & “Stargate AI” with Trump.
Give me something like Talos2 with a full OSS firmware and a performant CPU… and hell, a half-competitive open source graphics core too. It doesn’t need to be peak performance, it needs to be good enough.
I’ve been trying to work with SBC’s for a while for video decoding platforms and just wound up getting stuck on x86 because the ARM situation with weirdo custom kernels for anything useful is just… annoying.
lol those are dram chips in the stock photo.
(more risc v investment away from the us is a good thing though!)
China:
Can anyone knowledgeable tell us if this is feasible, practical, or a good idea?
I’m not knowledgeable enough to answer, but I know China’s also going big on RISC-V.
The great thing about RISC-V if you care about sovereignty in an age where CPUs run the world is that it’s an open standard. Contrast this with x86 which is owned in some part by US-based Intel and some part by US-based AMD as well as ARM which is owned by Japanese-owned, UK-based Arm Holdings. If you want to use x86, you’re shelling out license money to Intel and AMD, and if you want to use ARM, you’re shelling out license money to Arm Holdings. You never truly “own” what you’re producing.
Considering that you can buy some Raspberry Pi micro computers (these are ARM architecture computers) for less than €100 that are performance competitive with a lot of existing hardware; this idea would make a ton of sense for Europe to implement. I think Europe could probably start designing and manufacturing chips locally within 2 to 5 years on the low end 5 to 10 years on the high end.
ARM and RISC are not equal. The fastest current RISC CPU is an absolute potato. Then you’ve got ARM-based chips way faster than a Pi. Then there’s silicone like the M4. It’s a big uphill for RISC, which is why this, and the investments from the Chinese, are good but longer-term plays.
The question should be then what ARM CPU compares to current RISC-V best CPU and see the gap in years.
This would be hard to quantify. A year of work one year ago would take significantly less time now since the knowledge exists.
I’m talking about “X OSS software in version Y needed Z second to do this precise job”. Not “compare MFLOPS”.
