“There is no immediate solution. RISC-V, the open source processor architecture European sovereignty advocates point to as a long-term alternative, remains years from competitive performance in datacenter workloads. “It will take decades,””
Eh… what? I have a RISC-V SBC and it just works, running Debian on it in minutes of setup and it cost me peanuts.
Sure it’s not a state of the art CPU … and if I wanted to run anything demanding on it, I’d have to be patient. Heck it’s not even made in the EU but in China… but it works, today, it just depends on what your workload is. So yes it’s not the fastest or has the best efficiency but still, it exists already.
RISC-V isn’t in the same scenario. There’s one company behind ARM with a few external companies with architecture licenses (who doesn’t share their contributions), and ARM competes mostly just on the same commercial terms so for a long time it wasn’t worth investing in single core performance because they could instead fill the efficiency niche.
Also there’s more knowledge on how to build high performance cores. Doesn’t mean it’s trivial, but it means the lead isn’t several decades. With enough investment you can make it happen faster. And there’s a national security motivation for investing.
Actually a good step in the right direction, but it’s not the end.
RISC-V already exists so why not build on that?
It said RISC-V is decades away
“There is no immediate solution. RISC-V, the open source processor architecture European sovereignty advocates point to as a long-term alternative, remains years from competitive performance in datacenter workloads. “It will take decades,””
Eh… what? I have a RISC-V SBC and it just works, running Debian on it in minutes of setup and it cost me peanuts.
Sure it’s not a state of the art CPU … and if I wanted to run anything demanding on it, I’d have to be patient. Heck it’s not even made in the EU but in China… but it works, today, it just depends on what your workload is. So yes it’s not the fastest or has the best efficiency but still, it exists already.
What does that tell you about its performance under datacenter workloads?
RISC-V is more like 1-3 years away from CPUs existing that have competitive performance in datacenter workloads. Not decades.
But they won’t be manufactured in Europe. Getting fabs up and running is indeed something that takes a very long time.
I’ve been hearing this for the past five years.
People seem to forget that if one arch moves forward, so do every single competitor out there.
RISC-V isn’t in the same scenario. There’s one company behind ARM with a few external companies with architecture licenses (who doesn’t share their contributions), and ARM competes mostly just on the same commercial terms so for a long time it wasn’t worth investing in single core performance because they could instead fill the efficiency niche.
Also there’s more knowledge on how to build high performance cores. Doesn’t mean it’s trivial, but it means the lead isn’t several decades. With enough investment you can make it happen faster. And there’s a national security motivation for investing.
That may be so (hopefully), I’m just a layman quoting an expert.