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.
Not a matter of instruction set, though. Current RISC-V designs are built from scratch by companies pretty much doing their first chip and/or design studios out of the microcontroller space, if say AMD would spend a year slapping a RISC-V insn decoder onto their existing designs that shit would fly.
I guess of the big performance vendors Quallcomm will be first, they have a bone to pick regarding ARM licensing.
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.
Not a matter of instruction set, though. Current RISC-V designs are built from scratch by companies pretty much doing their first chip and/or design studios out of the microcontroller space, if say AMD would spend a year slapping a RISC-V insn decoder onto their existing designs that shit would fly.
I guess of the big performance vendors Quallcomm will be first, they have a bone to pick regarding ARM licensing.
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”.
I love the raspberry pi, but it’s far from being competitive to something like an apple m4, a Qualcomm snapdragon or an am5 chip from AMD.
For its intended purpose it doesn’t need to, but it’s way slower and less power efficient.