European RISC-V Industrial Computing Initiative

(erici.eu)

75 points | by ymz5 23 hours ago

8 comments

  • hn_submit 0 minutes ago
    I just purchased a boatload of Chinese RISC-V development boards for about $2.30 a piece. Can't wait to start playing with them.
  • perarneng 1 hour ago
    CPEU is coming! I love RISC-V and have been following its progress for so long. I hope it gets more and more adoption in the world for desktops and servers. Its already massive in MCU's but we need it everywhere. Open ISA is the best ISA
    • vaylian 1 hour ago
      What is CPEU? I don't see that acronym on the page.
      • rurifi33 54 minutes ago
        Probably a nice merge of CPU and EU
      • jabl 56 minutes ago
        Google says it's "CPEU most commonly stands for Continuing Professional Education Unit, a credit system used by dietitians and nutrition professionals.". Yeah, not sure how that is related to RISC-V. Perhaps we should eat RISC-V powered nanobots to, uh, future sci-fi something?
  • ShadowOfThePit 1 hour ago
    > A machine expected to run for 15 years should not depend on one company's roadmap, or one government's decisions."

    > A machine that runs for 15 years needs software that can be maintained for 15 years.

    I don't quite understand. Has this been a problem for industrial machines? Can't they already run for 30 years and more?

    What exactly is this initiative looking to fix and improve? Besides of the basic idea of FOSS being good, and whatever.

    • InvisibleUp 10 minutes ago
      They can run, but if one of the computer-related parts breaks down your only choice is scrounging eBay for replacement parts because (as an example) the software is proprietary and it runs on a weird MCA card with really precise timing and strong anti-piracy measures.
    • rurifi33 1 hour ago
      In the 90s and early 2000s server uptime might be counted in multiple years and extremes in the decades

      The industry can barely keep an npm update from breaking the world now.. and that’s build tools and environments and so it’s independent of “we use stable languages”

      Now add the possibility of political sanctions on ISA licensing and you have -

      Hardware that’s fails quicker and may not be available to buy, software that barely builds months later, and a world where the US president can sanction entities at will if they don’t comply…

      Yeah, open source isn’t all that’s required

      • renszarv 32 minutes ago
        I do remember a Freebsd 2.2 server, that after it's setup in 98, reached 800 days of uptime without any kernel upgrade, but the main reason for that, we were too afraid to do an upgrade, let alone a reboot, because if the server hadn't started, getting to it physically with a new boot CD, would have been a big issue. And that was the single server that the company had at that time, for a long time :)
  • hollowonepl 1 hour ago
    I like RISC-V as a concept but still only Chinese are focused on manufacturing those today.

    So.. it's a bit funny to read there is an European Initiative... to promote Chinese computer appliances.

    In times when fridges with Chinese electronics that are phoning home become more hack-able today than ever..

    • pjmlp 21 minutes ago
      That goes to show how low the things have gone with the US administration.

      In fact several countries do support Huawei store in addition to Apple and Google ones, including having the usual bank apps available there.

      https://consumer.huawei.com/pt/offer

      https://consumer.huawei.com/pt/campanhas/appgallery

    • csmantle 40 minutes ago
      It's interesting to see that both "Firefly AIBOX-K3" and "Milk-V Jupiter2" use cores from SpacemiT, a Chinese company. It's even listed as the "Reference stack" that is "Defined together, verified together"!

      > Hardware

      > RVA23 SoC with IOMMU

      > SpacemiT K3

      > 8× X100 cores, hypervisor extension, IOMMU

  • snvzz 1 hour ago
    RISC-V is inevitable.
  • dcreater 3 hours ago
    Vibe coded site and copy
    • soltanov 3 hours ago
      i am tired of seeing same patterns and designs on Internet. It is kind of frustration
      • minetest2048 1 hour ago
        And also real life.. there's no reason why a laundromat, barbershop and Japanese restaurant have posters that looks similar
        • soltanov 1 hour ago
          Agree, all of them in same industry mostly have similar posters. My eyes keep ignoring them and focus on service quality of barbershop and restaurants.
      • anonzzzies 2 hours ago
        By now I just want everything just to be black on white or white on black text and nothing else. Or better, just an md file.
      • dcreater 2 hours ago
        Yet it will be worse when we aren't able to detect it as easily
        • exit 2 hours ago
          what exactly will be worse once no qualitative difference is detectible?
          • jsumn 1 hour ago
            No difference in presentation doesn't make presented slop content less sloppy.
    • isolli 1 hour ago
      Indeed:

      "RVA23 silicon has arrived. The industrial computer built on it has not."

      "Until recently it lacked what industrial systems need. That has changed."

      So tiresome...

      • ShadowOfThePit 1 hour ago
        "The silicon is here. The industrial computer isn't yet."

        "An industrial computer has to do more: survive the control cabinet, talk to the field, and stay available for a decade or longer."

        Do people think this sounds good?

        And what if it does, but you and I are just tired from seeing it everywhere?

    • nine_k 2 hours ago
      Is it content-free? I don't think so. Is it hard to read? I don't think so either. Is it incorrect? I hope it's not %))

      Does it sound like a typical LLM-generated text? In many areas, it does. But why would I care? This is not expected to be a piece of literary art. Equally, the pictures illustrating it are not artistic masterpieces, and aren't expected to be. And even the letters in the text are not carefully handwritten by a human but machine-generated.

      Get used to it, and get past it. It's not worth the attention.

  • 0l 1 hour ago
    Yet another "initiative". I remember the European Processor Initiative that went precisely nowhere.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Processor_Initiative

    • goobatrooba 1 hour ago
      Not an expert, but reading the article you linked it seems it was quite stressful?

      > EPI demonstrated several results just after the Phase 2 end in 2026.[11] SiPearl demonstrated the Rhea1 chip running a complete HPC software stack. The system booted on a test board, with a standard Linux distribution running with high-speed HBM memories and their associated hardware performance monitoring counters. It successfully executed the HPL and STREAM benchmarks, demonstrating the readiness of the complete Rhea1 hardware and software ecosystem for HPC workloads to power Exascale systems. Rhea1 features 80 arm® Neoverse V1 cores, more than 61 billion transistors (7.8 billion equivalent gates), built-in High Bandwidth Memory, with 4 stacks of HBM, 4 DDR5 interfaces supporting 2 DIMMs Per Channel, and 104 lanes of PCIe Gen5 interface: up to 6 x 16 lanes + 2 x 4 lanes. Rhea1 was selected for implementation in Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. The next version, Rhea2, was selected for implementation in Alice Recoque, the second European exascale supercomputer.

      And then more paragraphs how work was taken forward..

  • weng 1 hour ago
    [flagged]