Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing
theregister.com
theregister.com
China to publish policy to boost RISC-V chip use nationwide, sources say https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-publish-policy-boos...
To be honest (I say this as an European), we have tougher nuts to crack the worrying whether cooperation with China will diminish or consolidate it's power. Our focus is now on defending peace and democracy in Europe (and on a larger scale non-US NATO). To say that China has its issues is an understatement (everyone has), but they are too far away to be a threat short- to midterm. Plus China also values international trade stability. So it would be silly not to look where we can (cautiously) cooperate.
Ideally we would like to continue to work with the US. But the US is less interested in Europe now and that creates a vacuum that will lead to new trade alliances.
I know the US get to have elections but its always between family dynasties, billionaires or corporate stooges. The choice is an illusion.
Lets cut out the middleman and know we're working with a different system for societal structure rather than one that pretends otherwise.
Although I say that and then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find which individual had the longest tenure of presidency and vice presidency combined. It seems like it’s either Nixon, HW Bush, or Biden.
I recently noticed with horror that my birth is now closer to the end of Victoria's reign in 1901 than it is to today.
It's like with russian gas once again, even the root of the problem is the same. One man with infinite power and no accountability for his actions.
Just for clarification. I don't blame Americans, but at least from my perspective, this electoral system is very radical and gives almost "absolute power" to a person or party that almost always has marginally more support. You do not need to compromise by creating coalitions etc.
In the end, it is the fault of us Europeans who blindly believed that any successful candidate would be in our favour and perceived as friendly. Although everyone understands how fragile elections are, this was naively ignored.
Canadians are taking Trump's threats very seriously, as is Greenland, as is Panama, as is the EU. And for good reason.
And the history of NSA spying on the whole world, see PRISM.
Such an event is also one reason India got my grandparent's generation to leave.
And the one about 175 years ago in Ireland probably contributed to both the (eventual) Irish home rule movement and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
While the Great Leap Forward's famine was avoidable in theory, I think that the historical examples of so many others having similar experiences during the transition from agrarian to industrial, shows that in practice the mistakes are very easy to fall into.
I think the logic might be that China just had their civilization-ending cataclysm, and so they're on the upswing now. Ditto Europe. This is probably not the end of the United States either, more like the Crisis of the 3rd Century. But it's just as logical to look back on the 400-year cycle and think "Better invest in the countries that have already had their crisis and dealt with it than ones that are starting to decay internally" than to look back on the last 75 years and think "Wow, that was chaotic, the next 75 years will be equally chaotic."
... and they learned nothing from it.
It's that China's economy is heavily dependent on exports - and dependability and the appearance of stability is generally good for trade. Obviously, this is helped by political stability, which means less scope for the kind of outward-facing destructive populisms we see in the US or parts of Europe. But with China's economy in trouble, that might very well change.
We will see what man made disasters the current (and future) US adminstration will cause. By every measure it looks like they are determined to find out the hard way.
according to someone's research[1]:
here are some civilian deaths within china:
- land reform killed 1-4.7 million
- campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries killed 712k-2mm
- three-anti and five-anti campaigns killed at least 100k
- sufan movement killed ~53k
- anti-rightist campaign killed 550k-2mm
- '59 tibetan uprising killed 87k
- violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm
- socialist education movement killed 77k
- guanxi massacre killed 100-150k
- inner mongolia incident killed 15-100k
- yangjiang massacre killed 3.5k
- daoxian massacre killed 9k
- ruijin massacre killed 1k
- zhao jianmin spy case killed 17k
- shadian incident killed 1.6k
- tiananmen square protests & massacre killed 200-10k
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42456077
> violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm
> they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine
so it's 52.5mm!
that's huge!
It's not as crazy as electing Trump, of course.
It is good for Europe to learn to stand on its - our - own legs, to become less dependent on the USA for territorial defence and probably also to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule. Si vis pacem, para bellum. It is not good for Europe to swap dependence on the USA with dependence on China, we're more than 500 million people with access to most of the resources we need to stand on our own legs so let's get crackin'.
Also, let's drop the silly panic around Trump, the man is doing what he was elected to do which is put America first. We should do the same, in a serious way. Not in an isolationist way but sensibly. Stop importing the world's problems, stop with the silly self-chastisement around 'climate' and 'colonialism', stop the import of islamism and make serious work of getting rid of the islamist factions which have been allowed to establish themselves or Europe as it once was - the birthplace of the enlightenment - will succumb to the sectarian infighting which destroyed Lebanon after they invited Arafat and his PLO.
So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
[1] Fascism and Communism are closely related so it is not that odd to call the current government form in China by the former name even if they claim to be the latter. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism for a definition or read what Mussolini had to say about the subject and you'll see the parallels.
Of course many were only 3/5th included. And half the population weren’t included at all.
General suffrage in 1789 was about 1 in 20 people, almost entirely white land owning men.
20 years later the vote was actually taken alway from many of the few black men who had it. White men still needed property. In parts of the US this property requirement lasted until the 1850s, and after that the requirement to be rich enough to pay taxes survived well into the 20th century.
I’m not criticising anything other than this idea that america was a government of the people by the people - at least until the 20th century.
People are more socially progressive now because of the passage of time, and the accumulation of sociopolitical observances it allowed. The average person now is only less of a brute because of the cultural training they’ve experienced, but it’s not something to be taken for granted.
In general, there are very few people (sages) who are more moral, ethical or curious than the average person of their own time. Often times their behavior makes them look like a loser or a weirdo to their contemporaries or society.
It isn’t true. And the idolisation some people have for wealthy white landowners from 250 years ago is just weird. Judge the world on today
I don't know if you're being serious here, but this (Ameri-centric? C21-centric?) view is laughable. Europe is well-acquainted with war and never saw lasting peace for much of it's history until the second half of the 20th century.
Which happens to coincide with the lifetime of the majority of Europeans. War was mostly something which happened to other countries, in other places - not in 'civilised' Europe, surely?
So yes, I am being serious - deadly serious. Most European countries neglected national defence after the fall of the Soviet Union in the expectation that Fukuyama was right when he claimed we were at 'The end of History' [1]. There is a good Swedish term for this condition: fredsskadad which translates to 'peace-damaged', the opposite of 'war-damaged'. It is the condition of a people who have gotten so used to peace being the norm that they assume that everyone everywhere else also considers peace to be the goal and thus no longer need to consider the possibility of ending up in a conflict.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57981.The_End_of_History...
But just one thing: while I personally share your take on the political and societal issues, I do think it's unfortunate that you lump "climate" in there, in scare quotes. The climate issue is informed by hard science. America's tendency to politicize everything will have terrible outcomes if climate gets completely caught up in the culture war. Whatever we think about the solutions, we have to find a way to agree that this particular problem is bad and needs to be addressed urgently.
Still, again, here is not the best place for this whole discussion.
I just want to be clear what you mean by hard science.
> Fascism and Communism are closely related
Oh, crap, no, we have some full scale war going on in Europe now, because Putin thought he keeps Europe on the gas & oil leash (and he was almost right).
So if you have a choice between a schizophrenic, antagonistic US, and a China who doesn’t care much about human rights but wants to keep stable international trade relationships, I’m really not shocked if you pick the later
The EU needs to be in a position where it can decide what is best for Europeans and not be strong-armed or overly dependent on allies that clearly don't share the same concern.
It is common for new employees to walk in with code bases of previous projects they have worked with and there is a great deal of administration involved in ensuring that no one else gets to work with more code than they absolutely need. Local builds and copying binary archives is common practice!
Incredibly common.
yeah, china is just not playing the stupid licensing and copyright game. chinese companies infringe trademarks and break licenses all the time. doing so boosts their business/economy overall so the state just doesn't bother with enforcing anything.
the annoying thing is that we're not really playing the game either, or at least, we have laws that get enforced "randomly". it was recent news that meta torrented some 80 terabytes of stuff (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...) and essentially nothing happened. back in the day aaron schwartz was driven to suicide over a way smaller chunk of scientific papers downloaded.
The point of closed source is that it allows the people doing the research and engineering to recoup and profit off their investments.
Which I’m in favor of.
However, considering currently the disproportionately overwhelming majority of the value is being captured by American firms, and the US has proven to be an unreliable partner, it’s in both the EU and China’s interests to eliminate the profit from this industry entirely in order to promote competitiveness with the US based front runners.
I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach.
Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-locked congresses) which preport to "represent the people" but just turn into "nothing gets done" factories.
So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done.
There are also obviously bad dictatorships.
All dictatorships, by definition, are better at getting things done than organizations that require non-unilateral assent.
Instead, the difference between a good dictatorship and a bad dictatorship is that in a good dictatorship, dissidents are eliminated quietly or, if not quietly, then with enough spin that everyone considers their elimination to be a good thing.
In other words, what good dictatorships are good at is PR.
- "Benevolent Dictators" of companies or projects have to obey the law - They can't forbid competition or alternatives - Every participant can leave at any time - If they burn the organization to the ground, the worst case scenario is the organization get replaced and people move on
I think it shows that we're using the word "dictator" way too casually in that case.
The problem is we look at those states and all we see is the existence of slavery (that existed in all societies till at least 1800AD), women being relegated to a different social role etc. But it is wrong to assume that any of those were due to monarchy and that a monarchy in the modern age would not rule based on modern values. Just look at Singapore, for a small example of a monarchy ruling based on current social mores. Unfortunately since WW1, monarchies throughout the world have vanished, and all we have are liberal democracies, so we can’t say either way.
In that case, I'd say that a monarchy is essentially dictatorship + a (usually) clear line of succession.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Thailand, Bhutan might be the only monarchies left. (Monarchy + clear form of succession).
Hurray us.
A good dictator is a...
It's a great country nonetheless, people are free in China, they have their own system and it works for them, good! Why pretend it's a democracy?
The Chinese would say the point of democracy is to translate the will of the people into action, it's to efficiently solve problems that people have, it's in their understanding neither liberal nor representative. In fact they'd likely turn your question around, if democracy is merely a set of procedures or rituals without concerns for the will of the majority, the demos which is in the name, why do you pretend to be one?
Can you criticize and ridicule your government? No? Not a democracy.
The core of democracy cannot be, in the words of the current American president, to be "good television". If all your democracy does is exhaust itself in staging content for social media, television and election campaigns you have inverted what the point of it is. People don't need governments so bad that ridicule becomes a daily norm, they need it to solve material problems and put food on the table. Anything else is simply decadence.
In this distinction there were no references to procedures or rituals, so it cannot only be a question of that.
We are reliant on the US as only 2 companies can make the x86/64 chips. I don't think Europe would be completely against working with a US or Chinese company like Hi Five/Star Five, as long as we weren't dependent on them, and could pull ties if they abused their position of control.
While that's not the entire process, and it would be a 20 year endeavour, it seems like funding the development of local capability here would be eminently doable.
Europe is also the current heavy hitter for fundamental physics research, so attracting talent and maintaining an ecosystem should be much more achievable.
On this, Trump's policy of putting tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan makes sense to make it worthwhile to put the fabs in Europe.
The x86-64 architecture is on its way out globally thanks to Arm. RISC V is not needed for decoupling from the US.
This wouldn’t be true if Europe was more willing to abandon international copyright laws, but given the amount of IP they own they are unlikely to.
Otherwise they would be more than happy to renegotiate chip licences if they feel that companies have overstepped.
Instead they publicly litigate and demand destruction of all designs.
might as well collaborate with them on this as well.
Russian presence in Syria prevented this but they're gone now.
In the future we can balance Russian cheap gas with Qatari cheap gas to not be held hostage by either party.
It would be a mistake to build dependencies on China when it's possible to avoid having dependencies at all.
I don’t see anything but regret for Europe several decades from now if they decide to start providing China with the technical expertise they’re currently lacking in this space.
This is all about China trying to find a way to escape the pressure of sanctions from Europe and the US.
For that matter the UK is composed of islands and parts thereof and nothing in "continental Europe", a term which refers to just the contiguous landmass. (Gibraltar is owned by the UK, but not part of it.)
Luckily Europe is not defined by the EU or sea levels, and the UK is very much in Europe the continent.
“The United Kingdom (along with the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar) was a member state of the European Union (EU) and of its predecessor the European Communities (EC) – principally the European Economic Community (EEC) – from 1 January 1973 until 31 January 2020.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_membership_of_t...
Compare the start of this subthread: “Didn't ARM start in Europe?”
Whatever point it is that subsequent responders were trying to score by mentioning continental europe is moot: Britain was part of Europe in more ways than merely its location.
"Was Acorn founded in part of a decendant of the European Coal and Steel Community, notwithstanding certain (disputed) conditions of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713)?”
TBH I'm still not quite understanding why people feel it is so important to clarify that Britain is only in Europe geographically; but I wonder, does it make a difference that Hermann Hauser is actually Austrian? ;)
(I'm really not interested in squabbles about national identity and EU membership, but I do think it's fun to examine claims carefully, especially when it undermines ideological talking points.)
RISC-V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
"Ask HN: How much would it cost to build a RISC CPU out of carbon?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41153490 with nanoimprinting (which 10x's current gen nanolithography FWIU)
"Nanoimprint Lithography Aims to Take on EUV" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575111 :
> Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.
Not as friends or allies, but there aren't a lot of those left anyway. It's only rational in this multi polar world to have some level of engagement with all parties.
Most of the sanctions Europe have on China were just to please the US anyway.
Shouldn't it be the mandate of liberal democracies to enable liberal democracies and to prevent authoritarian entities from growing power and reach?
We need these cheap-ish computers in the hands of people who will port software to the platform. Without a good selection of ready to go software, the hardware is pretty irrelevant.
I know there is Orange Pi Riscv but maybe there are other cheap hardwares.
Gives you something to play around with, very inexpensively.
But really, virtual machines may be preferable; at least to get started.
And what shall one emulate in a VM ? A nonexisting physical processor ? /s
At least, in quantum computing, that's how it works.
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43309376
I would currently recommend the BananaPI BPI-F3 or the OrangePI RV2 for that purpose, as they both have the same SpacemiT X60 cores, which support the vector extension.
Sadly there are currently only in-order cores with RVV support available. Getting a cheap out-of-order implementation is the next most important thing for improving software support.
Tenstorrent has announced they will release a 8x Ascalon devboard and laptop next year: https://youtu.be/ttQtC1dQqwo?t=1035
This unblocks me properly working to optimize for vector support in software. OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
Yes, I know I could use qemu, but it's not the same. I feel like this is what unblocks me on the software side.
The problem is that there are some things in RVV where it's unclear how they will perform on high perf OoO cores:
* general choice of LMUL: on in-order cores it's clear that maximizing LMUL without spilling is the best approach, for OoO this isn't clear.
* How will LMUL>1 vrgather and vcompress perform?
* How high is the impact of vsetvli instructions? Is it worth trying to move them outside of loops whenever possible, or is the impact minimal like in the current in-order implementations.
* What is the overhead of using .vx instruction variants, is there additional cost involved in moving between GPRs and vector registers?
* Is there additional overhead when reinterpreting vector masks?
* What performance can we expect from the more complex load/stores, especially the segmented ones.
The LLVM scheduling models give some insight:
* SiFive P670: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Targ...
* Tenstorrent Ascalon: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Targ... (still missing the vector part, but there is supposed to be a PR in the near future)
I'm trying to collect as much info on hardware as I can: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/index.html
https://sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550
https://sifive.com/boards/hifive1-rev-b
https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-fire
https://starfivetech.com/en/site/boards
https://milkv.io/docs/duo/getting-started/duo256m
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/The biggest problem with them is software. Many boards only have buildroot SDKs or niche and outdated. Fedora related images.
Though if you're experienced you can port your own linux distributions to these boards.
Yeah they'll be slow but nothing can be slower than an x86 loaded with a Windows 11 or something on it.
I nearly spit out my tea laughing.
That's going to be hard to beat, yes..
So youd have to convince a lot of people to learn other tools
> The first phase of this six-year endeavor is backed by €240 million (£200 million, $260 million) in funding.
For this to be a serious effort it would take another two zeros at the end of that number. This is 100x too small.
In 6 years, we'll have spent a pittance, to realize that we got basically nothing for it, and we're even further behind the US whose companies are spending tens of billions to develop new accelerators.
Let's take one US company at random, Groq, they've raised 10x this amount of money. That's one startup. Never mind Cerebras, SambaNova, Tenstorrent, etc. How is this effort going to compete? And they're giving the money to "38 leading partners" instead of one focused entity. It won't compete. It's just a waste.
The EU is still thinking too small. In an era where the US is no longer a reliable partner (maybe even a rival), and where Taiwan could disappear overnight, this is extremely stupid and dangerous.
I don't understand why the EU can't get serious about tech. Why does every investment need to be peanuts? Why can't we pay people well so they don't all leave to the US/Canada? Why can't we seriously invest in startups?
Private investors in Europe don't have the very deep pockets of US tech investors and there is much less of a culture of risk taking in investing in Europe on top of that
Edit: to be clear, I agree with your general point.
The US has been funded by an insane level of debt for the last 60+ years. Debt that might come calling quite soon, according to Donald Trump's own treasure secretary, iirc, and might even be the reason for all the current apparent international Trump-craziness (well, Trump being a narcissist certainly doesn't help).
While the EU has serious debt, if I understand correctly, that's several orders of magnitude smaller when compared to GNP, which limits the ability of the EU to invest.
Maybe someone from Europe could weigh in? I'm probably wrong, if the funding is transparent it should be easy to confirm or deny.
1. It is a single entity but composed of teams from 38 different partners. They have a "consortium". It has its disadvantages but it is not a completely independent funding.
2. The "consortium" may have asked for much more (between 5x to 20x more) and was probably denied.
As to your question of why we cannot seriously invest in startups?
- Because we do not have a single funding agency across whole of Europe. Each country has its own funding problems and Germany has its debt brake. So, the funding is not unified. Each country wants to fund 10 of its own startups instead of Europe by itself funding 10. This means 10x less money. EU Horizon projects didn't focus on industry at all. EuroHPC is a very new, 4 years into its first projects.
- There's no funding because we do not have customers! None of European tech companies will benefit from chips enough to invest in new tech. All of them are running old technologies. Car companies are to blame here because they are the biggest customers in Germany and they think of themselves as only car companies. No one in Germany is doing AI for cars for FSD for example. In general, European consumption is very backward and low-tech.
- Europe is finding it very hard to raise capital from outside Europe due to various reasons. Like Groq raised 650M from Saudi Arabia. In Europe, that is politically impossible.
I also found this report on their FPGA Emulation Platform: https://www.riser-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/RISE...
So from these resources it seems like they develop a vector processor with Semidynamics out-of-order Atrevido core as a scalar core and their Vitruvius VPU.
There is a paper about a previous iteration of the VPU: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3575861
In the more recent report they have a vector length of 16,384 bits, with 16 lanes (8 in FPGA, 16 in the diagram, final version could be more), so total of 16*64=1024 bits of ALUs.
Slide 15 seems to indicate that they want to create a chip with 32 of those cores, a shared L3 cache, and access to HBM.
Besides they are no longer 100% as you mention.
It is pretty hard to call Arm, or any decently sized modern company, 100% anything.
- Who Owns it (Japan) - Where is it headquartered (Cambridge) - Where is most of the IP produced (Cambridge mostly, but the remainder is in the US)
So if we care about being fast, surely the most expedient way, complete with guaranteed success, is to simply buy out softbank and then bring any IP development that's been offshored to the US back to Europe?
> Europe bets on supercomputing sovereignty
I'm laughing and dying inside. Europe has forfeited all possibilities on creating their own chips, partially because of production regime, partially because we were never good in this subject. At the moment the war is already lost (yes, I consider any negotiation for resources a war, whether in law creation or in movement of forces). Therefore, we're condemned to rely on China's supplies, and chips supplied by China will have this
https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid...
which defies idea of sovereignty at all.
the war against whom?
And chips are everywhere. Hence, the EU is dependent on China. Q.E.D.
Or maybe I am mistaken. Please tell me what you think regarding the above.
as for the thought exercise...
I have to say that the only way for the EU to be 'independent' is for it to be sanctioned by either China or the US.
For example, since 2000, China has attempted to develop its domestic chip industry with hundreds of billions of dollars, but this effort never materialized until chip sanctions were imposed under the Trump and Biden administrations
btw, i don't think this will come true:
> China says, 'Okay, I will put duties on the parts, chips and batteries you're buying from me.'
it's very unlikely that China will actively limit export for products, it harms more to China itself, it's more possible to limit export for resources like rare metals
This seems very focused on current architecture, which could be replaced with something more novel without the fundamental limits of matrix multiplication.
China is pushing RISC V aggressively, and might be a lot more likely to succeed in making competitively powerful cores than €240M pounds spent in Europe, where money won’t go nearly as far.
I imagine one of the biggest constraints on success here is just expertise. If Apple’s hardware team, or Qualcomm’s Oryon team were tasked with making a high performance RISC V CPU, I’m sure they could crank out something incredible pretty quick. But I have a feeling practical expertise on this sort of cutting edge hardware design is a rare thing. Frankly no idea how this human capital compares between Europe and China, but I’ll be excited to see progress and genuine competition on open architectures like this
> where money won’t go nearly as far
I'm not sure about this either - apparently high tech salaries in China are not out of line with Europe (both are way less than America).
But China does have more enormous companies that can fund their own chips (e.g. ByteDance).
Or did you mean RISC-V?
The world is abandoning rent seekers.
Right now, you are far more likely to use RISC-V and not know it than to knowingly interact with RISC-V directly. For example, since about 2015, Nvidia has used RISC-V as an onboard controller for their GPUs.
If you manufacture items at scale, getting away from ARM licensing costs per unit makes financial sense. Especially if you already have in-house expertise who can design chips tuned to your specific requirements.
ARM will get you power faster.
But in the long run, RISC-V will be the most powerful.
RISC-V being based out of Switzerland, the ISA being under a permissive Creative Commons license, and most software tools being FOSS is definitely why it's being adopted here. It's completely isolated from all geopolitics.
Arm even tried to cancel Qualcomm’s licensing agreement back in the fall. Using RISC V entirely circumvents not only royalty payments, but legal battles like that (frivolous or not).
The US (certainly the current US) can do that, but (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings):
“Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a Japanese-owned British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England”
If Europe is making a serious investment then it has more than enough power to say "you'll get the contract if you divest of X,Y,Z"
Or perhaps because ARM is miles ahead of risc-v today.
The USA pressures Japan to stop selling licences to European Fabs? Why, what would push them to such extremes?
Fabs can still produce those current designs (they just don't have licences). Now Europe can buy SoftBank out, or Britain can just walk into ARM Cambridge and say it's been sequested for the war effort.
Of course it would only ever come to this if softbank refused to sell and there was some national security angle.
If ARM want to close their office here, then the state can hire all their engineers and offer immunity/void on any NDA they've signed with ARM, if anything that's actually the most desirable outcome.
Again we're talking about things that simply aren't going to happen, and if they do there are much much bigger problems.
Even more, some considerations could have more weight then architecture for particular case.
Examples are good compiler/libs/frameworks, some specific software, good support, experience on similar contracts, big number of professionals with military clearance.
That's why some long time IBM won most govt contracts on supercomputers.
But once IBM decided, govt is not interest enough client and after that moment, most contracts won by Intel.
Examples was video chips, io chips, MMU, numerical coprocessor.
At that time (8086) Intel produced even RAM and ROM chips, so govt could buy all from one contractor, and this is also good in some cases.
The _current_ big EU supercomputer initiative does use ARM designs (https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/14/sipearl_rhea1_specs/ ), but you wouldn’t necessarily want to be totally dependent on them if you can help it.
ARM just announced they are manufacturing their own chips for the first time further threatening their customers (despite testifying the exact opposite in court a couple months ago).
Since SoftBank took over, their company has shifted and proved that when a standard is controlled by one company, there will eventually be issues.
Switching to RISC means those issues won’t ever happen again.