“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.
Nothing because it depends on the workload? I mean if you run a static Website to few people it’s more than enough. If you’re trying to predict weather or render high definition 3D graphics in real-time it’s not… but also nothing is so…
Was it a rhetorical question and if so what were you implying?
Depends entirely on the metrics you use for comparison. In terms of performances yes of course it’s slower than others, nobody is contesting that. In terms of openness it fairs better than most. My point was solely that it’s usable for some use cases and thus that it’s not a theoretical architecture in 2026. It works. Yes it’s slow but for use use cases it doesn’t matter.
If you don’t care for openness then it’s not competitive. Being competitive depends entirely on your constraints.
“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,””
To which you replied with ”Eh… What?” and went on to tell an anecdote about how it works well on a personal computer running linux. It doesn’t really relate to the problem in hand here although is neat.
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?
Nothing because it depends on the workload? I mean if you run a static Website to few people it’s more than enough. If you’re trying to predict weather or render high definition 3D graphics in real-time it’s not… but also nothing is so…
Was it a rhetorical question and if so what were you implying?
It was a rhetorical question. I wish all good for that architechture, but it doesn’t seem very competitive as for now.
https://ben3d.ca/blog/risc-v-in-2024-is-slow
Depends entirely on the metrics you use for comparison. In terms of performances yes of course it’s slower than others, nobody is contesting that. In terms of openness it fairs better than most. My point was solely that it’s usable for some use cases and thus that it’s not a theoretical architecture in 2026. It works. Yes it’s slow but for use use cases it doesn’t matter.
If you don’t care for openness then it’s not competitive. Being competitive depends entirely on your constraints.
The case was described in:
“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,””
To which you replied with ”Eh… What?” and went on to tell an anecdote about how it works well on a personal computer running linux. It doesn’t really relate to the problem in hand here although is neat.
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.