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Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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The case was described in:
"There is no immediate solution. RISC-V, the open source processor architecture European sovereignty advocates point to as a long-term alternative, remains years from competitive performance in datacenter workloads. "It will take decades,""
To which you replied with ”Eh.. What?” and went on to tell an anecdote about how it works well on a personal computer running linux. It doesn’t really relate to the problem in hand here although is neat.
Because those components are (theoretically) sold as equivalent. If you sell me cycles in a data center, one for 10e/h and another for 100e/h (because it's 10x slower and thus must have ~10x more instances) and you don't give me any details on why, I'll take the 10e and of course it won't be competitive. FWIW I do buy compute time in data centers and I'm also aware (but not involved with) https://www.top500.org/ and how none of them are RISC-V based, it's not my point. My point is that the metrics to compare will never make it competitive if we exclude its raison d'etre. RISC-V was never proposed to be the most efficient and powerful architecture (even though of course it'd be nice if it'd be).
It's like apple versus orange then complaining that the apple doesn't taste orange-like enough. Sure, that's correct, but also pointless.
Edit : it's not an "anecdote" it's a proof of existence, again RISC-V works today. It's not set of blueprints. It does compute, easy as that.
So even you know it’s not being used to any scale in data centers. In theory they could run on Raspberry PIs but that’s not useful to the problem in hand. Where did you get 10x slower by the way?
An anecdote does not imply that something is not real.
Starting to worry we're talking past each other.
Yes, RISC-V isn't used at scale in data centers. Now though that NEW criteria are taking into account, namely sovereignty, they precisely might despite their limitations, including performances. If though it's just political signalling without any actual will and subsequent advantage and in reality only performance matters, they still won't be used.