Who actually builds these manufacturing facilities? Is America just a financial services empire now? Two can play this game.

Compared to x86, which is wholly owned by an American duopoly and needs licensing to produce legally, boosting RISC-V is a major step towards chip independence for Europe. With the current state of the US it almost seems a necessity. The only downside here is that it didn't happen sooner.

What about ARM? Isn't it also European?

While ARM Holdings is based in Cambridge, England, it is majority owned by SoftBank Group which is a Japanese investment conglomerate.

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.

SoftBank is technically hedquartered in Japan but it is mostly owned by Saudis.

This statement seems to be factually untrue. Mashayoshi Son owns 32-33% of Softbank and then the investors are like the Japanese Master Trust bank etc. Saudi Arabia is not even in top 10 of the investors list.

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.

It is if you define the UK being in Europe (the continent). It isn't part of the EU as of today, although there's a good chance it will be again in the future.

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

ARM is still IP locked like x86_64.

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.

You don't need to define the UK being in Europe. UK is and forever will be in Europe, full stop.

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".

Others have already talked about the Japanese and Suadis.

My point would be that it has already been demonstrated that you can lose access to ARM technology as a consequence of US sanctions.

ARM is not a sufficiently independent ISA to guarantee sovereignty.

With RISC-V, you may lose access to a specific core, chip, or supply chain. But your ecosystem can pivot to an alternative. Long-term, you have the option of complete in-sourcing.

So, even working with Chinese chips and boards today can be progress, as long as more domestic RVA23 options can be expected to arrive later.

Even if Intel licensed x86 no one in Europe would want to make them. Unless they're guaranteed a monopoly there will be no takers.

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

Such development boards are a completeley different thing compared to RVA23-profile RISC-V CPUs.

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...

These implement 16-register cut down RISC-V RV32EC_Zmmul instruction set. It's an interesting choice. I wonder if they can run Coremark or Dhrystone so one can get an impression of their performance at 48MHz.

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

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

These are more than sufficient for simple control applications. I'm just wondering if I can run a small GUI on it driving an OLED display.