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Comment by matt-p | Hacker News Reader

Surely arm is a better choice?

ARM Holdings is, ah, not necessarily the easiest company to work with. See the Qualcomm saga: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/arm_qualcomm_nuvia/

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 sued their largest customer.

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.

Choosing RISC-V here is more about how much soverienty a country has over the IP than anything else here. The US can probably consider most-all ARM IP to be dual use technology and immediately deny use of it.

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.

And non-Apple Silicon is British?

ARM Holdings is British. Anyone making ARM cores (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon’s Graviton…) is paying licensing fees to a British company.

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).

And ARM makes reference designs which most ARM chips just use.

> The US can probably consider most-all ARM IP to be dual use technology and immediately deny use of it.

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”

There are still ARM offices in the US in which their work, IP, etc would be subject to export restrictions.

ARM in stock listed in New York, it cant avoid US assertions

So what, there's nothing done in America that can't be brought back to Cambridge or London just as easily as we offshored it.

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"

I'm all in for RISC-V, but ARM Holdings is British (and owned by the Japanese SoftBank group). ASML is in the The Netherlands. And there are some European ARM CPU vendors (NXP, ST Microelectronics, etc.). So Europe could also standardize on ARM without sovereignty issues?

Why risking doing that if you can go to ASML and those vendors to manucature you RISC which isnt owned by Softbank…

Because almost all software runs on arm today, almost none (comparatively) runs on risc-v.

Or perhaps because ARM is miles ahead of risc-v today.

I think we should definitely invest in RISC-V, open is preferable, especially in a continent-wide initiative. I’m just contesting that the US could unilaterally sabotage ARM use in Europe.

ARM is a British company. We are in Europe.

It was founded in Britain, but it is a Japanese company ATM as per it's SoftBank ownership.

So what? Japan are Europe's enemy now? Could the EU not just buy 25% or something?

Its specifically Softbank which might be japanese but its very much aligned with US and VC funds. It might as well be VC fund.

So what? What's the scenario here?

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.

Given ARM is mostly an IP bsaed company that wouldn't really work. For reference just look at what happened with ARM's china susidiary with which this basically happened.

ARM China is a sales office. Not the same thing at all. If a design is made in a British office of a British company, 'by hook or by crook' the state can gain access to it. That's the hard, perhaps slightly uncomfortable truth.

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.

RISC-V is an open standard. ARM still needs to be licensed.

The world is abandoning rent seekers.

Is ARM better than RiSC? How many RISC computers can I go buy right now at the local Carrefour here in Barcelona? Weird definition of “abandoning.”

Both ARM and RISC-V are Reduced Instruction Set Compute (RISC) instead of Complex Instruction Set Compute (CISC aka x86) architectures. So it's more about the tooling that makes one better than the other. And like all open source, the tooling will be better over time as people and organizations recognize they get more back out of contributing to open systems.

That's way too optimistic. If it's like "all open source," it will have some improvements, forks and then nothing. There are only so many people who can contribute to chip development, and they all have jobs.

Wait. I thought the Musk-Trump regime was going to usher in a glorious post-scarcity economy based on the genius and purity of crypto?

LLVM and GCC succeed because it’s cheaper to add support to a couple open tools than build your own competing compiler.

RISC-V is probably no different than ARM at it's core. Also, both of them are RISC ISAs.

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.

Western Digital also announced they were looking (have already?) to move to RISC-V.

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.

I'm not native English speaker but I think that the current and near situation in local Carrefour would be influenced by “abandoned” rather than “abandoning”.

ISA differences are very small. Not enough choose one over another when there are more important issues at stake.

The EU is better off trying to build a local capability, riscv is the best bet as you dont need an architecture/ISA license or dependencies on geopolitics

Depends on what criteria you use for "better". ARM is surely more advanced technologically, but RISC-V may be a more future-proof decision as you're not necessarily tied in to one company that may change their licensing costs in the future.

Mandatory Light/Dark side of the force reference.

ARM will get you power faster.

But in the long run, RISC-V will be the most powerful.

"Execution out-of-order you want, hmmmm?" - Yoda

Not if your goal is to decouple from the US.

ARM Holdings is a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, and so not a US company. In what other sense is it coupled with the US?

It is not for the rest of the world who are banned from using advanced US technology so best for the world is for China to get to parity on node size as well as rest of the world to adopt RISC-V.

When making sophisticated big projects, usually weighting many considerations, not just architecture.

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.

Also in Intel case at 8086 years, very important was large number of support chips, greatly surpass any concurrent.

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.

RISC-V's vector extension ("V") is markedly "Cray"-like.

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