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.

"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...

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

Do people think this sounds good? Maybe it does, but you and I are just tired from seeing it everywhere?

Then people like you and me, who read AI prose all day long, went and read the book, and we all immediately knew the book was, at the very least, heavily AI-generated. For a few tragicomic months, people were in denial, going on TV to defend his book and defiantly proclaiming that "a machine could not have written this", only exposing their insulated ignorance.

Hence the question: do we dislike this style because we read it all day long? Was it originally pleasing (it probably arose out of RLHF), but then used excessively? All while famous French writers and critics had nothing but the highest praise for the book...

Note: after the author could not prove authorship, his editor officially declared that he had, indeed, used AI to write the book [0].

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...

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

> 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..

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

I don't quite understand. Is this an active problem for industrial machinery? What exactly is this initiative looking to fix and improve? Besides of the basic idea of FOSS being good, and whatever.

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

I know uptimes were a flex back in the day but now a long uptime is an indicator that maybe you’re treating your machine as a pet instead of cattle.

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..

> Hardware

> RVA23 SoC with IOMMU

> SpacemiT K3

> 8× X100 cores, hypervisor extension, IOMMU

And no, I’m not American, nor I think Americans can be trusted more these days in the race of global surveillance programs.

But having open, patent free standards is noble. I love the idea.

In fact several countries do support Huawei store in addition to Apple and Google ones.

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

As others ITT have pointed out, this is a vibecoded site from one guy lol

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50349860

We're probably getting to a point where AIs will just generate optimized binaries directly, so I'd rather have them generate them in a machine language that is human friendly. RISC-V being designed by humans with a focus on simplicity is close to the best we could wish for.

- RISC-V is "open", except in none of the ways that matter to me. What I want is a well-documented platform able to run fully open software. RISC-V does not inherently provide the former and the latter has nothing to do with ISA. If anything, manufacturers seem to take GPL-licensed software, modify it then _not_ publish the modified source code.

- Lately I've started to care a lot more about minimal software stacks that are easier to prove to work as intended. Part of that includes generating raw machine code and I hate the terrible immediate encoding especially for C instructions. Compare with x86-64 where you can just write the constant straight to memory. x86-64 would actually be a nice ISA if it were not for prefixes + lack of explicit instruction length.

- It seems there is an excessive focus on hardware "simplicity" (for very small cores) while neglecting simplicity on the software side. I would benefit greatly from automatic bounds checks, checked arithmetic... and many "safe" languages would too. This "simplicity" apparently is also why the immediate encoding is so ridiculous.

[1]: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005011967676963.html

What's important in the context of a European "sovereign computing" initiative is the licensing of the instruction set architecture. Like x86, ARM is still proprietary, while RISC-V is a free and open standard.

Saudi Arabia did recently invest 45 billion dollars in the vision fund which is an investment fund managed by Softbank but they haven't really invested within Softbank itself so not it is not mostly owned by Saudis from what the data can tell.

Even though it's Japanese-owned most of their R&D still takes place in England.

RISC-V is IP UNlocked. I bought RISC-V mini-boards (so cheap) years ago because I was planning to build my keyboard... but I am still on other projects... and there are even better RISC-V miniboard nowdays (better USB, more GPIOs... for a full fledge BFO-9000 keyboard!).

What I am waiting for are RISC-V high performance micro-architectures which will use the best silicon node (desktop, mobile, and for servers it seems there are a few attempts). One of the main issue seems... the compressed instructions which should be removed as it increases implementation complexity significantly in order to apply some of the known high-performance optimizations (it is not anectodale if ARM removed thumb machine instructions).

I like the idea, I code as much as possible things in RISC-V assembly now, and re-use a ton of code paths (at the assembly level!). I have even written a small RISC-V interpreter for x86_64 for static exes.

I know that sometimes "European" is used as a synonym for "in the EU", but most of the time this is sloppy. Nobody in Europe thinks UK is "not European".

All they want is to suck at the government's tit.

This is like comparing an 48MHz ARM-Cortex-M0 with the CPU in your Macbook. Yes both of them are ARM cores, but the small embedded processor has very little RAM/Flash/clockspeed, no memory management unit, no cache, no modern RAM interface.

Not even the instruction set is really the same, because you (typically) won't even have floating point instructions/registers on the small MCUs, much less vector instructions.

The Milk-V Jupiter 2 mentioned in the post is basically a full-fledged Desktop CPU and it's price is not gonna be anywhere close to $2 either...

8k RAM, 64k ROM, compressed RISC-V insn set.

Edit: Apparently it's a QingKe RISC-V with about 130 Coremark.

So European, right?

I'm immediately thinking, there's got to be some sovereignty aspect to the initiative. Right?

But, if you look at the "The silicon is here." section and dig a little:

> "Shenzhen MilkV Technology Co., Ltd" [1]

[1]: https://milkv.io/about

Wake me up when someone can actually build a computer from scratch with EU-made parts in 2026.

What would it take to make this possible, if not completely then at least move in the right direction?

Aside from re-thinking computer manufacturing from the ground up.. RISC-V, or something like it, seems like part of the solution.

That may be a high bar. Would all countries in the world collaborating, except for China, Taiwan and South Korea, even be able to do this?

Great idea, but if the important EU players aren't there, what's the point?

About ERICI

ERICI is a non-commercial initiative in its founding phase. It is not yet a legal entity, sells nothing and charges no fees.

(https://erici.eu/impressum.html)

The random dude is not looking for funding.

it means not intended with the purpose to make money from it

founding doesn't always imply. a startup-like process of selling stock (or similar) to investors which in turn want some profit from it long term

it can also mean looking for donations to found a project, i.e. cover it's costs

The telling thing is in benchmarks the Loongson outperforms them, by a lot.

It's a far better measure than "despite all the years of unfulfilled hype and promises we'll absolutely have a smorgasbord of performant RISC-V cores Real Soon Now". Single core performance down in the Intel Core range? Needs 96 cores to even be competitive on a handful of benchmarks that don't equal a modern users compute needs? The competition isn't sitting on their hands, and RISC-V hasn't delivered the performance it's fanbois have told us is 'inevitable'. Loongson has at least managed late-2010s levels of performance.

Maybe RISC-V will completely take over the embedded market. That's not a bad gig. High volume, tho slim margins, lot's of niches for lots of innovation (want to continue to go crazy with ISA extension? Not a big deal in the embedded world). But they're still selling billions of 8051s, ARM is ubiquitous but even they didn't take over that world, and I know how I would lay my bets there, too.

At some point we have to accept it isn’t happening.

I hope that leading European industrial computer manufacturers notice the initiative and join -- or at least start evaluating the possibility to use RVA23 SoCs in their devices. Yes, currently only Chinese vendors can provide such chips, but the world is changing fast.