this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
462 points (99.8% liked)
Technology
64937 readers
4406 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can anyone knowledgeable tell us if this is feasible, practical, or a good idea?
With tariffs and sanctions, it has become clear that open standards which can’t be controlled by governments are what is needed.
With what’s been happening over the past few years, there will be a lot of interested in this. Recently, I’ve seen lots of news about it, but that could just be the algorithm.
Feasible, yes. Practical, hard to say. Good idea, yes.
RISC-V is open-source architecture based in Switzerland (although it started in University of California).
One thing going for it is China is spending billions a year towards RISC-V adoption so they do not get sanctioned by the US. You need money and engineers working on it towards these type of open source to compete with existing players.
Yes, yes and yes, but it'll take a while. It's a six year project overall.
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.
This is the way
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.
It helps significantly that the EU already has a lot of the necessary expertise at every level.