Do you DARE? Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty
- Reference: 1741333087
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/03/07/dare_europe_risc_v_project/
- Source link:
If you're having deja vu, you're not alone: Europe has been [1]talking about and toying with [2]using RISC-V for [3]supercomputing for [4]some years , even getting far as [5]some silicon , though turned to [6]Arm's architecture for its [7]first exascale system. The continent hasn't given up on RISC-V, though, certainly not with America in the state it's in.
The [8]DARE project is supported by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). The project aims to create three chiplets – individual chip dies that can be combined to form complete processor packages – and has already picked leaders for each effort:
A vector-math accelerator die tuned for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, led by Barcelona-based chip designer Openchip
A next-gen inference chiplet from Dutch startup Axelera AI
A general-purpose processor die, driven by Germany's Codasip
"DARE is daring to start from the top of the technological complexity pole and produce European-designed processors chips for supercomputers, paving the way for Europe's digital sovereignty," Osman Unsal, DARE principal investigator at BNC-CNS, said in a statement.
The first phase of this six-year endeavor is backed by €240 million (£200 million, $260 million) in funding. DARE has given itself the goal of developing the three above-mentioned RISC-V chiplets in three years.
[9]
Axelera AI, which says it’s been [10]awarded €61.6 million (£52 million, $65 million) in funding from EuroHPC, appears to be the furthest along on its journey toward creating a datacenter-class RISC-V chip. While most of its current lineup is focused on running AI models at the network edge, we're told its upcoming Titania chiplet will be designed for server-grade workloads.
[11]
[12]
On the surface, Axelera's chips follow a similar formula as other AI ASICs, such as Google's tensor processing units. The Dutch outfit's current silicon feature four accelerator cores, each with a matrix multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit, a RISC-V control core to make the accelerator programmable, and some digital signal processors which handle neural network activation functions.
Like some other designs we've seen on the market, these MAC units, which are responsible for the bulk of today's AI processing, are embedded in a pool of SRAM enabling efficient streaming and crunching of matrices through the chips; it's classic in-memory processing you see more and more these days.
[13]
CEO Fabrizio Del Maffeo told El Reg Axelera's arrangement of its MAC units allows its quad-core AI processing units to achieve more than 200 INT8 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of inference performance while consuming just 15-20 watts of power.
The forthcoming Titania will take this same basic formula but scale it up, with more processing cores on-die and multi-die system-in-package designs.
Codasip already offers several 32-bit embedded-class and 64-bit application-grade RISC-V CPU cores, which appear to be aimed at network edge, IoT, and modest personal computing devices. In a [14]press release , the biz said the DARE project would provide it the resources to extend its portfolio to include high performance applications including "AI, big data processing, and supercomputing."
[15]
Little is known about Openchip's vector accelerator.
[16]Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight
[17]EU plans to 'mobilize' €200B to invest in AI to catch up with US and China
[18]Xen Project delivers solid hypervisor update and keeps working on RISC-V port
[19]NASA's radiation tolerant RISC-V computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts
Europe isn't alone in looking to the royalty free RISC-V ISA as the foundation of technological independence. India has [20]chosen RISC-V in its quest to create highly capable domestic chip designs. China’s Alibaba last week [21]unveiled a RISC-V CPU design called the XuanTie C930, which it claims can power PCs to automobiles, amid rumors that Beijing will soon issue guidance that suggests widespread domestic use of the instruction set.
While RISC-V is open and permissively licensed, American lawmakers have sometimes [22]called for the US to prevent China's access to the tech. ®
Get our [23]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/17/europes_exascale_supercomputer_chips/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/08/riscv_hpc/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/24/european_processor_initiative_phase_one_concludes/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/08/eu_chip_projects/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/22/first_riscv_epi_chip/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/14/sipearl_rhea1_specs/
[7] https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/09/16/thinking-outside-of-the-box-with-the-jupiter-supercomputer-datacenter/
[8] https://dare-riscv.eu/launch-of-dare-sga1-project/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z8rR2dFJjItPH3TcefDK6QAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.axelera.ai/news/axelera-ai-secures-up-to-61-million-grant-to-develop-scalable-ai-chiplet-for-high-performance-computing
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z8rR2dFJjItPH3TcefDK6QAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z8rR2dFJjItPH3TcefDK6QAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z8rR2dFJjItPH3TcefDK6QAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://codasip.com/press-release/2025/03/06/codasip-selected-to-design-a-high-end-risc-v-processor-for-the-eu-funded-dare-project/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z8rR2dFJjItPH3TcefDK6QAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/26/europe_has_second_thoughts_about/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/eu_plans_to_mobilize_200b/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/06/xen_seapath_open_source_hypervisors/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/nasa_radpc_firefly_moon_mission/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/19/india_microprocessor_challenge_risc_v/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/05/china_alibaba_risc_v_c930/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/07/proposed_restrictions_riscv/
[23] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
For AI use, or for Human (League)?
For Europe, is this the things that dreams of made of, or more of a do or die effort? Is it time to open your heart to a new ISA, or has the funding only become available because of politicians listening to the sound of the crowd? Is this just seconds, because ARM and x86-64 have gobbled up all the other chip markets?
If it doesn't succeed, Europe can only blame the mirror man. (Yes, I Dare(d) to add that one in...)
Re: For AI use, or for Human (League)?
Best two albums Human League ever made were Reproduction and Travelogue. I like Dare, but it is a bit more commercial.
Anyway, as others have said, competition and the instability of the US means alternatives are what we need.
"While RISC-V is open and permissively licensed, American lawmakers have sometimes called for the US to prevent China's access to the tech"
Because some US law makers are dumb as a bag of rocks, and don't understand its an open source design, so it too late to stop China using it now as they already have mass produced chips using the RISC V ISA.
open what ?
In my understanding, RISC V is an open architecture.
Then designer may decide to create a closed or open design using this ISA.
Feel free to correct if my understanding is wrong
As I understand it..
From what I've understood about RISCV, it's the 2025 equivalent of the 74 series logic chips that were widely used in the 70's - in that it's a building block for a system. It's just that our idea of a building block has moved up a few levels of complexity from individual gates to units of computation.
The problem with RISCV (again, as I understand it) is that the architecture does not solve, or recreate the performance solutions found over decades of development of established architectures. You can plug in a RISCV core and it will interface with common components in a predictable way, and run much the same software as another RISCV core - but from what I've seen of commercial offerings, it will be significantly slower (perhaps orders of magnitude slower) than existing, cheap-as-chips(!) architectures.
So projects like this appear to be at a severe disadvantage... spending very significant sums to try and compete with freely available commercial devices, and hoping in n-years' time that you can narrow the performance gap from an already handicapped position. If you cannot then make it on a sufficiently modern process node within the region, any pretence at technological independence is pretty much pointless. That makes it more of a political gesture, and brings into question whether picking just a handful of companies to deliver the project is really doing much to seed innovation or independence in the wider sector.
So... hummm..
As an aside, the acronym reminds me that the Gorillaz track 'DARE' was claimed to be originally written as "There" by Albarn, but when they got Shaun Ryder in to sing, they couldn't get him to pronounce it as anything other than "Dare". Still, every project should have an anthem
Good!
With America becoming steadily more unstable and China being... well... China, a European alternative is overdue.