return to table of content

Barcelona Supercomputing Center presents Sargantana: new open-source RISC-V chip

lifeisstillgood
64 replies
1d5h

I would love to see a clear roadmap from the EU (not been successful searching)

My take on this is

1. this is less about competitiveness at the cutting edge and more about security and economic on-shoring

2. building chips on-shore at the 40-20nm level massively reduces risk, increases the likelihood smaller states can build locally and solves for most chip needs

3. chips we need are rarely the cutting edge AI stuff. The vast volume of chios will go in as controllers on screens, USB connectors and so on. Building plug and play alternatives will give local manufacturers choices, and incentives will help.

4. the big win is security. Does the CEO of sensitive company, the head of security services and the general in charge of procurement use keyboards, cpus motherboards and monitors made from open source chips manufactured in a trusted nation? What is the BOM for the challenger tank - how many chips in there that are made by whom and ...

the process is long and arduous and the risks are huge.

But we make tanks from steel other materials made in "favoured nations" - surely the same applies to silicon?

cduzz
42 replies
1d4h

My understanding is that a 40nm fab is only economically viable if it's spent the first several years of its life producing high margin chips.

In other words; the life cycle of a 40nm fab is:

  1997: start building fab
  2000: fab goes online and starts producing CPUs 
  2006: fab upgraded
  2012: fab switches from CPUs to video and memory controller  chip sets
  2018: fab switches to USB controllers and embedded chips
  2019: fab offline for 2 months because an antiquated but critical part is broken and is only brought back online because another similarly old fab went offline and sold off their parts
  2020: fab shut off because of covid
  2021: fab found to be a write-off because too many things broke while fab was offline.
So if you skip straight past the profitable phase, you end up spending billions of dollars to make a fab that makes $0.30 parts, and it'll never be profitable unless those parts are $10 each, which in turn makes the product they're in unprofitable.

FirmwareBurner
29 replies
1d4h

You are correct. Building fabs today only for fabbing much older nodes will not be profitable. You have to target 22nm and below otherwise you can't afford to jump in the semi fab ring.

zozbot234
16 replies
1d4h

You will always have pure analog electronics and other bespoke things that basically don't benefit from anything finer than these nodes. Even for digital chips, it makes no sense to use leading edge nodes for very simple logic where a lot of the area is just contact pads.

jacquesm
12 replies
1d4h

It's not about what you can do or can't do. It is about what you can do profitably and that's a completely different thing.

voakbasda
11 replies
1d2h

I have to wonder if the ability to profit depends entirely on the established cartel of semiconductor manufacturers. They determine the current prices of chips in the marketplace.

If entering that marketplace requires competing with them, then I am not sure anyone that is not already in the market can ever win. The margins are too low and the startup costs are too high.

Government intervention seems to be the only possible solution, and that option hardly sounds viable when considering that cartel’s collective lobbying power.

cduzz
7 replies
1d1h

I don't think this is a "cartel of semiconductor manufacturers" so much as it's been a "shambolic cluster of organizations running crappy old fabs into the ground producing cheap chips that were subsidized by a prior decade's worth of very expensive products."

I can afford to sell gazillions of chips at $0.08 per chip if I'm running a fab I didn't pay to build. I'm only (barely) paying for the inputs. When Stan, the last guy who understands how to run the widget verifier, or Elaine, the last lady to understands how to run the polishing machine retire, I'll have to close up shop.

Those $0.08 per chip devices have been absurdly subsidized in that a replacement infrastructure to make them would require that they cost $10 per device, and the ecosystem of things built on $0.08 chips isn't viable in a $10 per chip world.

In order to have a fab make $0.03 per unit devices, you first have to have the fab spend 10 years making $300 per unit devices, regardless of the underlying node size of those $300 per unit devices.

Likely you couldn't even go back and make a fab that makes large volumes of 60nm-90nm node sizes at all, for any amount of money, because the equipment to do this (new) hasn't been made in 2 decades and no company is willing to invest the money to make new crappy old equipment.

It's not a nefarious oligopoly as much as a synchronized "run the asset to failure" lifecycle of the infrastructure.

How much does it cost to make a 300 year old tree?

cf1241290841
4 replies
20h21m

Likely you couldn't even go back and make a fab that makes large volumes of 60nm-90nm node sizes at all, for any amount of money, because the equipment to do this (new) hasn't been made in 2 decades and no company is willing to invest the money to make new crappy old equipment.

I believe your argument assumes that there is a fixed cost to produce even 180nm or 350nm ICs that hasnt changed since the first one was produced.

We still need 300 years for a 300 year old tree, but 25 year old technology might now be relatively easy to build if we start from scratch.

What was high tech then might be relatively easy to solve now. One example might be https://github.com/circuitvalley/USB_C_Industrial_Camera_FPG... being open source instead of a multi year, multi million dollar project.

cduzz
3 replies
20h2m

Yes, my argument is that producing at industrial scales even chunky nodes requires enormous capital expenditures and may be impossible without rebuilding large chunks of an antiquated and abandoned supply chain.

Even if it is 10% the cost of making the each of the individual components involved in making a relatively simple 90nm chip, you're still looking at vast costs.

If you're talking about making 30 chips in a university fab, sure, I'll concede that it is "possible" but if you're talking about propping up an industry built on products that require a herd of standardized "$0.30" parts made on legacy 90nm fabs, that ship has sailed.

Update your BOM and recertify or raise your costs by an order of magnitude.

zozbot234
1 replies
19h16m

The problem I see with this argument is that there are plenty of fabs making trailing-edge devices, some of which aren't even that old. It even seems to be part of the established path for countries and locations more generally that seek to bootstrap a semiconductor industry of their own. They get started with the simplest and coarsest nodes, then go finer step by step. Even TSMC got their start that way. So it seems like a pretty robust industry to me, I'm not seeing the argument for a crisis.

cf1241290841
0 replies
19h4m

Personally i cant follow this line of reasoning. In the end this is an economical argument, as they still buy machines from the same manufacturer. At that point its a matter of being able to deliver and create a market for ICs with the given machines. Which is often achieved through political will and subsidizes to get to that point.

My initial argument is that while you cant compete with ASML products in 2023, you will be able to economically compete with some of their older products once you go back far enough.

cf1241290841
0 replies
19h35m

First off, you are definitively making a very solid point, cost for getting mass production right are a killer once the institutional knowledge is gone. For example, its very visible in the field of battery technologies if i am not mistaken. Going from lead to lithium was a gigantic task and the inertia going forwards hasnt reduced enough at this point.

But realistically this is a matter of going back far enough, to lower the cost far enough? 10% are a good start but to stick to the topic, physical gyroscopes from decades ago are now replaced with MEMS ICs where the reduction in cost is magnitudes more then down to 10%. At a certain point the reduced cost makes it viable. The question is just has it been long enough?

While we wont get 90nm cheap enough, the question is what can we do on a hobby level (vs academia)? Because going from there (neglectable cost and technological requirements) to mass production will at some point be cheaper then the cost of setting up reproducible tooling for older high tech systems.

I am likely still off with 180nm, but there should be a level at which this makes economical sense. A level that gets cheaper to reach with technological progress / time.

photonbeam
1 replies
23h49m

How much does it cost to make a 300 year old tree?

Aside from your main point, I found this an interesting thought exercise thinking about cost of air, sunlight, soil, water and then 300 years of security

Qwertious
0 replies
16h18m

I imagine if you're going to grow one 300 year old tree, then your best bet is obscurity. Find a stable very-rural area that's not prone to bushfires, plant one tree and make sure it's doing well for a few years, come back 300 years later, you're done.

If you're not going the obscurity path then you'd really want to scale it up - there's not much difference between security for one tree and security for 100 trees.

mardifoufs
1 replies
1d1h

There's no real cartel for older nodes. It's not even really possible considering how many fabs exist and how many players are operating those older fabs.

cf1241290841
0 replies
20h20m

Number of producers of these fabs is still quite limited though.

jacquesm
0 replies
1d1h

The capital expense on a new fab is crazy. There may be a cartel factor but that usually would work to the advantage of the manufacturers, so that doesn't seem to be the case here.

janekm
1 replies
1d4h

But you can only really make those profitably for a few industries (military, medical, seismic come to mind). The EU does have the chip fabs for those industries, of course...

phkahler
0 replies
1d3h

> But you can only really make those profitably for a few industries

I think it's more like they're only profitable if the equipment is already paid for. And even then the margins may be low.

cf1241290841
0 replies
22h27m

Relevant to mention MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) in this context, which use much older nm tech. Be it digital micro mirror devices¹ or gyros². Or photo/laser diodes.

Given the physical limitations, as well as the problems we have with code base security it might be time to aim for cheaper production of something in the region of 180nm instead.

Looking at how old much of the standard weaponry used today is (TOW 50 years with an actual physical gyroscope, Javelin still 25 years³), the demand from the military alone should cover the initial cost. Especially if you look at the ludicrous prices western countries payed for even dumb artillery shells.

¹ Texas Instruments DMD from a DLP projector from @AppliedScience https://youtu.be/9nb8mM3uEIc?t=428

² Explanation of MPU-6050 from @BreakingTaps https://youtu.be/9X4frIQo7x0?t=664

³ Teardown of both from @lelabodemichel5162 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7-6hgX7-zQ

Sorry for late edits

hajile
4 replies
1d4h

TSMC is building a lot of new 28nm production with plans to shut down all their older nodes and move everyone over in the next few years.

GlobalFoundries (formerly AMD fabs) created a brand-new 22nm planar process specifically for older chips as an upgrade to other company's 28nm processes.

Profits seem possible if you approach it the right way.

throwup238
1 replies
1d3h

The math works out a lot better when you’re upgrading pre-EUV fabs or expanding an existing facility. A lot of the gear and setup is mostly the same such as wafer cleaning, HVAC and isolation, etc and the local challenges to setup and labor have been figured out.

ls612
0 replies
24m

Whatever is the best they can make a DUV, planar process do will be used for decades to come.

FirmwareBurner
1 replies
1d3h

We're talking about different things here. I was talking about building new fabs for 28nm nodes and you're talking about TSMC upgrading existing fabs from older nodes to 28nm production.

Of course upgrading an existing older "sunk-cost" fab to 28nm production will be profitable, but not building a new one from scratch just for that same older node.

AnthonyMouse
0 replies
18h52m

But now this makes the subsidies angle make more sense: You subsidize initial construction and then the domestic plant remains online indefinitely because the construction is a sunk cost and the incremental cost of upgrades over time is sustainable.

cduzz
2 replies
1d4h

"But I've got a product that's certified with this part that's running on a 40nm process that has these specifications that are deeply tied to features of that 40nm process; things like voltage ranges and temperature tolerances! If you force me to switch to a comparable but not identical part at 22nm I'll have to re-certify my widget with 18 different regulatory agencies!"

Someone
1 replies
1d

If those are your needs, you order all the parts you need over your product’s lifetime up-front or get (= pay for) a contract with the manufacturer that makes them promise to sell you the parts for X years (they probably wouldn’t keep producing old parts, but would stockpile enough of them to be able to deliver working ones years later)

(Or you prepare for having to go to eBay for working parts. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/us/for-parts-nasa-boldly-...)

kjs3
0 replies
18h43m

There are companies (I've used Rochester Electronics) that both stockpile and manufacture legacy chips specifically for the long tail support situations.

Workaccount2
2 replies
1d4h

There might be an argument then that it would be worth it for the state to take the hit. If shit hits the fan and you have zero semi-manufacturing, then you are going to be pretty screwed.

qwytw
1 replies
1d2h

If shit hits the fan and you have zero semi-manufacturing, then you are going to be pretty screwed.

I don't really understand this claim at all. Chips are not exactly fungible, unless you force your local companies to use you "state sponsored chips" in their products just being able to produce "chips" wouldn't be that useful. What are you going to do with them?

15155
0 replies
1d1h

Guide munitions if needed.

black_puppydog
0 replies
1d4h

So the cost of building a fab hasn't come down in the last decades, huh? Genuinely asking, is there some^W^W^W what is the "uncompressible" cost in fab-fabbing? I'd totally guess that staff and the building itself are not it?

RobotToaster
4 replies
1d4h

How does an entire semiconductor factory become FUBAR from being offline for a year?

cduzz
1 replies
1d4h

The example is hypothetical, but complex machines can be complex to keep running, and often suffer catastrophically when shut down.

If the fab was barely profitable before shutting down, it doesn't take much to total it. Fabs are full of machines that cost tens of millions of dollars when they were new and there are simply no spare parts of vendor support for them now, and you can't just swap in a modern replacement. Fabs are full of extremely sensitive environments (no dust here, acid that will kill you if you touch it there, constant temperatures, no humidity, etc). If any of that is compromised, it's now just a toxic waste dump.

Again, I have no specific knowledge in this domain, but I imagine most of the time the owner's happy enough just to walk away from the headache.

tyingq
0 replies
1d

There's also the brain drain aspect. All the process engineers and techs that understood all the various "recipes", quirks, etc, of the various machines moved on to other work.

A new crew will eventually work it out, but there's a lot of trial and error getting to the right bake time/temps, spin rpm, etc, etc. Yield and rework suffers while they do that.

TheCondor
0 replies
1d3h

Not an expert, but there are additional start up costs that need to be spent to “start it up.” With any significant downtime, those could eat up any possible profit unless it’s a newest technology fab.

JAlexoid
0 replies
21h34m

Dust is the simplest example.

Once you shut off the dust extraction, you may just end up with too much dust collected in the equipment to make it utterly useless.

BiteCode_dev
4 replies
1d3h

Not all ventures need to be profitable. The EU may decide to take a loss on this solely for strategic reasons.

qwebfdzsh
3 replies
1d2h

strategic reasons

Such as? I can't really think of any benefit besides providing jobs and funding for contractors (so kicks backs etc.)

Then again it's not particularly surprising, the EU is well know for wasting massive amounts of money on all sorts of nonsense while ignoring things that actually matter.

mbauman
1 replies
1d1h

There's both supply-chain and runtime security.

cduzz
0 replies
22h49m

Don't forget the MBAs willing to burn it all down to juice the Q2 profits.

KerrAvon
0 replies
22h31m

Have you looked at a Pentagon budget lately? It's entirely welfare for defense contractors.

mcbits
0 replies
21h20m

Sounds like there is a need for investment into innovation beyond just building the next-generation fab for $2^x billion. Bringing the cost of a new less-advanced fab down from $2 billion to $100 million, and then building 20 of them, could also be profitable (though less exciting). There is a national economy that's actually been growing quite well for a few decades now by applying that general idea to other industries.

georgeecollins
0 replies
19h11m

But if you were a country or an alliance that wanted to be 1000% sure you always had access to a component (drone parts) you might be willing to pony up billions to make sure you could not be blockaded or embargoed. I don't know if that makes sense but given what is going on in Ukraine and the Mid East, people have to be thinking about that.

ksec
11 replies
1d5h

building chips on-shore at the 40-20nm

the process is long and arduous and the risks are huge.

Plenty of 28nm+ chips Fabs are inside EU. And more are coming online. This isn't a long or arduous process.

Edit: Should have been Plenty of 28nm and above. As the original quote state.

FirmwareBurner
10 replies
1d5h

>Plenty of sub 28nm chips Fabs are inside EU.

Which are those "plenty" sub-28nm fabs exactly?

AFAIK only Global Foundries Dresden goes down to 22nm and 12nm, and I think that's by far the most cutting edge fab currently in EU, making the Ryzen IO dies and other such things.

But even TSMC's future Dresden fab starting construction next year(hopefully) will start making mostly automotive chips for NXP, Bosch and Infineon chips at 28nm and 22nm all the way in 2027(!), with plans to go to 16nm and 12nm in the further future.

Your view on EU cutting edge semi fabrication seems very optimistic.

wiz21c
9 replies
1d5h

and TSMC is not exactly a european company...

FirmwareBurner
8 replies
1d5h

Of course they weren't gonna export their crown jewels outside of Taiwan, the same way how the west didn't export their crown jewels to Asia when they did the technology transfers for semiconductor manufacturing in the '70s, making sure to keep their Asian partners at least a node behind.

Well well, how the turn-tables.

toyg
7 replies
1d4h

Everything gets out in the end. My Italian hometown had a "golden age" of silk manufacturing for a while, thanks to bugs smuggled out of China. It lasted for a couple of decades and then they were again smuggled out to other Italian towns. And then of course you have the nuclear shenanigans.

If European countries wanted the tech bad enough, they would find ways to get it. The problem is not the know-how but the massive investments needed to productize it.

FirmwareBurner
4 replies
1d3h

>The problem is not the know-how but the massive investments needed to productize it.

Are you telling me the EU, the richest block in the world, has less money to spend on fabs than TSMC, as if the EU is scrapping for change behind the couch cushions.

If only you knew how much money the EU wastes through various useless and vanity projects that accomplish nothing except getting certain well connected people rich, we could have built 3x TSMCs.

But unlike Taiwan, we're lacking in visionary well educated tech leaders, and drowning in clueless politicians and established gentrified industry players who lobby the funds go to their projects instead.

dataking
1 replies
1d2h

Are you telling me the EU, the richest block in the world, has less money to spend on fabs than TSMC

That could very well turn out to be the case in practice, not for lack of money, but inability to provide the promised subsidies according to Financial Times:

https://www.ft.com/content/898454ba-8fc2-4b00-a14f-5f9ee152d...

FirmwareBurner
0 replies
1d

Having a company an industry dependent on generous subsidies from states is a race to the bottom. TSMC will just pit you against other countries on the basis of "which one of you is gonna give us more of your tax-payers' money and we'll build our fab there"

toyg
0 replies
22h17m

> Are you telling me the EU, the richest block in the world, has less money to spend on fabs than TSMC

I didn't say we don't have the money, but that it's a problem to commit the money. It's basically the norm that EU countries unanimously agree that "something should be done" on a certain issue, but then disagree on how much it should cost and where the money should come from. This gets more and more complicated the bigger the cost is (and this is an expensive idea) and the farther we are from the regular 7-year-budget process (it was last agreed in 2020, so jockeying for big items will probably resume in 2025-26).

I don't disagree on the overall lack of vision in European political classes (hardly a fault of the EU, it's common to basically all countries and all levels of government), but even a visionary leader would have to work hard to get agreement on such a big project.

qwytw
0 replies
1d2h

the funds go to their projects instead.

To me it just seems like relying on government funding to drive innovation in sectors where private companies have incentives to compete is extremely foolish.

formerly_proven
0 replies
1d4h

massive investments

EU is turning back towards Austerity 2.0: Electric Saveroo these days.

JAlexoid
0 replies
21h29m

Em.... ASML, a Dutch company, produces the tech behind these nodes.

It's a question of supply chains - not tech.

Gravityloss
2 replies
1d5h

There are projects like Helios: Highly Efficient and Lightweight Input/output Open Silicon

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/190183836

But AFAIK this is just a small part of large amount of multiple projects.

FirmwareBurner
1 replies
1d4h

A lot of EU semi research goes on at IMEC in Belgium, but EU still lacks the actual means of put any of it into production on their own soil. EU fabs have given up going beyond 12nm as it was deemed too capital intensive.

Gravityloss
0 replies
4h59m

Thanks! I was somewhat expecting someone to actually drop into this thread to put links to many 100 million level programs... :)

londons_explore
1 replies
1d4h

What is the BOM for the challenger tank - how many chips in there that are made by whom

In today's world, it would seem more sensible to just stockpile enough of all the components for 5-7 years of tank production, knowing that if your enemy tries any evil tricks then you have half a decade to figure out how to redesign or make the components yourself.

Keep a close eye on anything that looks like an antenna and it isn't so bad having the enemy backdooring your chips either.

jes
0 replies
1d3h

This has been my take as well. There is a lot of disruption in a company when a key part, like the FPGA that serves as a communications nexus in the product goes EOL and everyone scrambles for a year trying to engineer in a replacement.

Buy enough parts for expected product life, make good use of the time you didn't waste on scrambling, and when your product is EOL sell any left-over parts on the secondhand markets.

anonymou2
1 replies
21h15m

security, yep! they will run Microsoft Windows, Google proprietary javascript, and Whatsapp for "secure" communication on these chips!!

incompatible
0 replies
21h7m

Is there some reason why you wouldn't be able to run a purely open source software stack on it, if you wanted? Does Microsoft Windows even run on RISC-V?

qwytw
0 replies
1d2h

about security and economic on-shoring > increases the likelihood smaller states can build locally and solves for most chip needs

I'm not sure what does that mean? What specific chip needs that would that solve and what benefits would this provide? If those chips are not competitive nobody would buy them? So what would governments do with them? Stockpile them for the future just 'in case'?

The problem is that unlike grain or oil chips are not exactly fungible if your military production or other vital industries lose access to their current suppliers they wouldn't be able to use your slow, outdated and overpriced chips anyway (and forcing them to do that under normal circumstances would make your products less competitive).

BOM for the challenger tank

How many other components does the Challenger tank contain (IIRC it's not really produced anymore anyway) which are not manufactured in the UK? In any case stockpiling necessary chips etc. just in case the UK won't able be able to acquire anything from the US/Germany/etc. seems like a practical approach than trying to develop everything inside the country.

mastax
0 replies
1d3h

I agree that often the less cutting edge chips are important but doesn’t the EU already have that handled with ST Microelectronics, NXP, Infineon? What’s lacking is very high end CPU, GPU, high end memory, high end FPGA.

Y_Y
18 replies
1d6h

For those of you who don't speak Catalan, "sargantana" is a common little local lizard (Podarcis hispanicus, "Iberian wall lizard"). Of course the chip family (Lagarto) just means "lizard" in Castilian.

vlugorilla
11 replies
1d3h

Spanish, castilian does not exist

dragonwriter
8 replies
1d3h

Castilian absolutely exists, and us more specific than “Spanish”.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Castilian

cosmojg
5 replies
1d3h

From Wikipedia[1]:

Castilian (castellano), that is, Spanish, is the native language of the Castilians. Its origin is traditionally ascribed to an area south of the Cordillera Cantábrica, including the upper Ebro valley, in northern Spain, around the 8th and 9th centuries; however the first written standard was developed in the 13th century in the southern city of Toledo. It is descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, with Arabic influences, and perhaps Basque as well. During the Reconquista in the Middle Ages, it was brought to the south of Spain where it replaced the languages that were spoken in the former Moorish controlled zones, such as the local form of related Latin dialects now referred to as Mozarabic, and the Arabic that had been introduced by the Muslims. In this process Castilian absorbed many traits from these languages, some of which continue to be used today. Outside of Spain and a few Latin American countries, Castilian is now usually referred to as Spanish.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language

Y_Y
4 replies
1d1h

From the page you linked:

Name of the language

In Spain and in some other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, Spanish is called not only español but also castellano (Castilian), the language from the Kingdom of Castile, contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, Asturian, Catalan, Aragonese and Occitan.

The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole of Spain, in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. "the other Spanish languages").
anthk
3 replies
20h33m

It's the same language. I'm a Spaniard, so I know it well. Name it the way you'd like, it can be called Spanish, Español or Castellano everywhere from Mexico to Patagonia, and from The Canaries up to the Pyrenees.

amenhotep
1 replies
17h13m

"name it the way you'd like, it can be called Spanish" is a very different proposition to "[you should say] Spanish, Castilian does not exist [and you are wrong to use that name]", which was the angle of the poster who kicked all this off.

vlugorilla
0 replies
8h45m

I just answered with my point of view in the parent comment

enriquto
0 replies
18h34m

from Mexico to Patagonia, and from The Canaries up to the Pyrenees.

Sounds a bit imperialistic?

Notwithstanding the tens of millions of native speakers of autochtone non-spanish languages in these territories: Mapuche (260K), Quechua (7.2M), Aymara (1.7M), Guaraní (6.1M), Wayuu (400K), Mayan (6M), Miskito (150K), Garifuna (120K), Nahuatl (1.7M), Mixtec (530K), Catalan (4.1M), Basque (750K), Galician (2.4M). Spanish is quickly eroding all of these, but they still exist! (And this only counts native speakers. The number of people who are fluent in Guarani or Catalan is certainly more than the double of that.)

vlugorilla
1 replies
8h46m

There is a bit of a controversy around this. And I don't say you are wrong. It's just that I personally consider that Castilian should not be used and does no longer exist. Here's why I think it like so:

Castilian originated as one of several Romance dialects in the Iberian Peninsula. It developed in the Kingdom of Castile during the Middle Ages, distinct from other regional languages like Catalan or Galician. With the unification of Spain, Castilian gained prominence, eventually evolving into modern Spanish. This was not merely a linguistic shift but also a result of political and cultural dynamics. The language we now call Spanish has absorbed influences from Arabic, indigenous languages of the Americas, and others, diverging significantly from its medieval Castilian origins. For this, Castilian has now disappeared, you just need to read how Castilian was written to see it has nothing to do with modern Spanish.

Today, Spanish is spoken by over 500 million people worldwide. In contrast, the Castilian region of Spain has a much smaller population (~3M). Referring to the language as Spanish acknowledges its extensive global presence and its modern version. Just as we refer to the language originating in Tuscany as Italian, not Tuscanian, calling the language from Castile 'Spanish' aligns with common linguistic naming conventions. Languages often take their names from the nations or cultural entities they are associated with, not their specific regions of origin.

Modern linguistic institutions, like the Real Academia Española, regard 'Castilian' and 'Spanish' as synonyms but recommend 'Spanish' for its inclusive and global character.

Y_Y
0 replies
6h30m

This is a nice and thoughtful post and I agree mostly. I'd like to add that my use of the word "Castilian" reflects my experience of usage of the term here in Barcelona (when speaking "Spanish", Catalan, and English). It's not a hard rule of course, but people are especially likely to refer to Castille over Hispania when distinguishing from other languages spoken historically within the country.

The term also usefully refers to the prestige dialect of Spanish, as might be spoken in Madrid. This is useful to distinguish from e.g. the "al-andalus" (Andalusian) spoken in the south which is more treated as a dialect than a separate language (though the distinction is of course fuzzy).

(On the other hand Barcelona in particular has a significant population of sudamericanos who will usually say "español", certainly that term is well used and understood.)

snvzz
0 replies
6h37m

Catalan is not Castilian.

(and Castilian exists)

BonitaPersona
0 replies
3h25m

In spanish it is interchangeably called castellano or spanish. Outside Spain it is always called spanish.

The same way valencian is decidedly called valencian in Valencia, but people from Catalonia insist on calling it "simply a dialect of catalonian".

The same way hispanics in America are called "latinos", while americans with italian and french heritage are not.

The same way americans with english heritage aren't called "anglos" but simply "americans".

Once you begin actually looking at the language used you understand that it is NEVER unintentional

iamsaitam
2 replies
1d5h

(bonus).. and lagarto is the same in Portuguese as well

germandiago
0 replies
1d4h

Warning, offtopic but funny: FWIW "lagarta" in spanish slang is a girl with a lot of ambition looking from things from men taking advantage of them. Not a "worker" but a dangerous person. Lol

MoSattler
0 replies
20h3m

same in aragonese

znpy
1 replies
1d4h

I don't know, I'm not a lizard expert but that lizard looks the same as the ones I saw when I was a kid in the south of Italy.

I guess if I ever start a chip fab there I'm gonna call my chip stranvicula or something like that.

Anduia
0 replies
1d3h

They are very similar. The Iberian ones are smaller, with broader heads, and are sometimes more colorful. I'm pretty sure that a Catalan would call the Italian ones 'sargantana'.

Narishma
0 replies
22h25m

It's mentioned in the article.

ansible
17 replies
1d6h

Here's a pre-print paper I found:

Sargantana: A 1 GHz+ In-Order RISC-V Processor with SIMD Vector Extensions in 22nm FD-SOI

https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sarga...

RV64GC with a subset of the v0.7.1 vector extension. 1.26GHz nominal clock on a 22nm process.

DeathArrow
5 replies
1d6h

22nm FD-SOI

That's kind of not good news. I was hoping for 4nm to have some alterative to Intel/AMD/Apple.

stefs
0 replies
1d5h

i guess this chip is not for high end gaming machines or servers, but rather cars, industrial machine controlling, smart fridges, that kind of stuff. during covid production of many appliances ground to a halt because of various chip shortages. now what if for some reason asian chips became unavailable in europe (wars, natural catastrophes, ...)? cheap and easy to build is far more important than high end performance here.

rwmj
0 replies
1d5h

You don't do your first experimental test chips on 4nm. That's where you get to when you have raised hundreds of millions after you've gone through several iterations to prove to investors you know what you're doing.

imtringued
0 replies
18h30m

Well then you're supposed to take a look at what Tenstorrent is doing. They haven't named their processor after a dragon slaying sword for no reason.

imiric
0 replies
1d6h

It's unrealistic to expect these chips to compete with modern manufacturing standards. Still, it's very impressive the progress RISC-V has made in the last few years. It's actually a viable option for many projects now.

bibanez
0 replies
1d5h

Guess what you need to develop 4nm (spoiler, it’s a lot of money). There are many applications where 22nm is a good tradeoff.

0xDEF
4 replies
1d4h

RV64GC

C

What is the purpose of including the RISC-V Compressed 16-bit extension set in what is supposed to be a HPC chip? Most embedded/IoT RISC-V implementations include that for obvious reasons but why here?

brucehoult
2 replies
1d4h

If you don't have the C extension then you can't run off the shelf Linux distros such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and are limited to what you compile yourself e.g. Buildroot / Yocto.

However the actual academic paper says it's RV64G, no C.

cmrx64
0 replies
1d4h

The RVV here isn’t compatible with mainstream Linux anyway.

ansible
0 replies
1d3h

Thanks for the correction Bruce. I was in a rush (never post when you are in a rush, or drunk, or angry) and I was so used to seeing RV64GC that I didn't notice the absence of the 'C'.

cmrx64
0 replies
1d4h

the same reasons motivating C still apply at HPC: higher code density means fewer bits wasted representing redundant information, better cache utilization, minimization of memory fetch bandwidth, etc.

basically, every metric derived from code size is happier when you have 20-30% fewer bits representing it.

camel-cdr
2 replies
1d5h

So an in-order core that is slightly faster than rocketchip in their benchmarks. That doesn't seem all that exciting, except for the vector extension, although they only support a small subset of it. Thats sounds similar to spatz [0] and given their numbers is slightly faster.

[0] https://github.com/pulp-platform/spatz

ansible
1 replies
1d5h

The previous DVINO was a 5-stage in-order, this Sargantana core is a 7-stage out-of-order write-back with register renaming and a non-blocking memory pipeline.

So it is not a full in-order or a full out-of-order design.

galangalalgol
0 replies
1d4h

Are the vector extensions the fixed size ones or the originally proposed lanecount agnostic ones? That is the aspect of riscv i'm most excited about.

darksaints
1 replies
21h6m

That sounds like the perfect high end MCU core. Doesn’t say what the target use case is, but if it’s like other RISC-V announcements, they’re probably talking about general purpose CPUs, in which case those specs are pretty disappointing. It’s a shame that RISC-V has made so little impact in embedded electronics.

albuic
0 replies
6h6m

It has made lots of impacts but just not publicly (in embedded like hard drives, eytc...). Also there is not as much spent in advertisement in comparison to "the brand new Apple chip" which is backed by a company with deep pockets (and which evidently is also more powerful)

ksec
0 replies
1d5h

in 22nm FD-SOI

That basically implies being Fabbed with Global Foundry inside EU ( Germany ).

paulluuk
9 replies
1d6h

The BSC, Europe's leading developer of open source computing technologies

The fact that the [..] architecture [..] of these new processors is open source, and therefore non-proprietary and accessible to all, reduces technological dependence on large multinational corporations

I hadn't heard of either BSC nor Open Source Computing before. I'm curious though, are there a lot of people out there who are not tied to large corporations and who have the knowledge and the means to produce computer hardware? Are there hobbyists out there producing their own custom chips and graphics cards?

tecleandor
5 replies
1d6h

The BSC has been featured a bunch of times around here due to their Marenostrum Supercomputer. A month ago someone posted a virtual visit to their Marenostrum 4 location, that's kinda surprising/interesting because is located inside an old chapel:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38160675
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MareNostrum_4_supercomputer_at_Barcelona_Supercomputing_Center_1_br.jpg
Their Marenostrum 5 is number 8 in the TOP 500 supercomputer list ( https://www.top500.org/system/180238/ ) and I think it recently started working or it's about to do it now ( https://www.eetimes.com/bsc-about-to-dispatch-marenostrum-5-... ) . They had to change its location as it didn't fit in the church anymore, though.

ciberado
3 replies
1d5h

But they will keep the Marenostrum 4 in the chapel this time, instead of replacing the old generation with the new version :).

tecleandor
2 replies
1d5h

Nice! The real Computing Church!

jacquesm
1 replies
1d4h

If they ever get AGI going it will have come full circle. You can go there to pray to your very visible god. Prompt engineering will be the new praying, you read it on HN first...

bee_rider
0 replies
22h36m

Training in the Cloud, fine tuning in old churches, inference in your home shrine.

malwrar
0 replies
1d2h

If anyone likes ambient music, an artist I like produced an album from recordings of marenostrum: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1EGmWY91Vus

I find it oddly relaxing.

rwmj
0 replies
1d5h

They co-hosted the RISC-V Summit back in 2018: https://riscv.org/proceedings/2018/05/risc-v-workshop-in-bar...

kinow
0 replies
20h30m

For anyone who hasn't heard about the BSC, you can check out the website or, if you are more inclined to read code:

- https://earth.bsc.es/gitlab/es/autosubmit/ - project I joined last year to work on, a workflow manager used in MareNostrum to run mainly (but not exclusively) climate experiments - https://earth.bsc.es/gitlab/es/ - other projects from my department - https://gitlab.bsc.es/explore/projects - general projects

There are also lots of interesting projects, like Aina, a project in partnership with Generalitat de Catalunya (like the council? prefecture?) to foster the Catalan language with models and tools using HPC resources: https://projecteaina.cat/

alfonsodev
0 replies
1d6h

I don’t know about hobbyists but there are less known companies doing open source hardware for sure, [1] here is an example of cool stackable parallel computing project. I participated on the campaign and received mine, but not sure how are they doing today, it was a while ago.

Edit: Andreas Olofsson the original founder seems to be still active in the field [2]

- [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-s...

- [2] https://x.com/zeroasic?s=21&t=xSlFhUGn5i8d8RkXrsgAIg

ashvardanian
9 replies
1d3h

Does anyone know a decent RISC-V developer kit that one can buy in the Bay Area today? Or rent somewhere in the cloud? I want to start porting our C libraries to RISC-V.

LeonM
5 replies
1d3h

There are plenty, SiFive and MilkV sell boards for example. You can also just run emulation.

ashvardanian
4 replies
1d3h

There are plenty that exist, but i haven’t heard of anyone using them or any stores selling them.

Emulation isn’t enough. I need to benchmark the libraries. Emulation will add significant overhead.

LeonM
2 replies
1d2h

I need to benchmark the libraries. Emulation will add significant overhead.

Do not expect good performance from RISC-V processors at the moment.

Emulation on a modern X86 CPU will outperform any commercial available RISC-V processor at the moment.

camel-cdr
0 replies
1d2h

This isn't true in my experiance, especially when dealing with the vector extension.

But emulation doesn't offer any usefull performance insights anyways, except for maybe dynamic instruction count.

brucehoult
0 replies
21h15m

Emulation on a modern X86 CPU will outperform any commercial available RISC-V processor at the moment

That's not true.

qemu-user is a little faster than the single-issue HiFive Unleashed from 2008, but qemu-system is slower.

Against either the dual-issue U74 cores in the JH7110 or the small OoO cores in the TH1520 and SG2042 qemu doesn't sand a chance on a core for core basis.

It used to be the case that qemu could win on x86 by throwing more cores at the problem, but with the 64 core SG2042 in the Milk-V Pioneer that possibility has disappeared too -- not to mention that the Pioneer is $1500 for chip+motherboard (need to add RAM and storage), while a 64 core x86 is $5000 just for the chip.

brucehoult
0 replies
20h58m

There are plenty that exist, but i haven’t heard of anyone using them or any stores selling them.

You probably can't walk into your local mall and walk out with one, but it's easy enough to buy boards on Aliexpress or on Amazon (it's usually the same company, shipping from China, either way)

As for people using them, I guess most people simply don't advertise what they're using. I'm working at a very large company that is porting certain x86/Arm software to RISC-V. We're using the VisionFive 2 as the reference device. It's the best current combination of performance, price, and software maturity. I've also got the Lichee Pi 4A and the software works fine on that too (it would be shocking if it didn't) but it turns out that despite the specs on paper the VF2 is 20% faster anyway.

If you need to use SIMD/vector rather than plain C then the only choice for RVV 1.0 at the moment is the CanMV-K230 which has a single 1.6 GHz core vs quad core on the other boards. It's also only just come out. My order made on October 29th hasn't arrived yet, though they claimed on November 12 that they'd received stock for it. Mind you the Pi 5 I ordered on September 29 only just arrived last week, so this is not unusual for brand new boards.

snvzz
0 replies
14h29m

If you want the least amount of trouble, VisionFive 2 has the most mature upstream support.

Gets you RV64GC and Zba, Zbb. Low power, passive cooling is overkill. Performance somewhere between rpi3+ and rpi4.

slaw
0 replies
17h13m

You could try Lichee Pi 4A, CPU TH1520, 12nm, RISC-V 2.0G C910 x4

https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a
camel-cdr
0 replies
1d2h

It depends, mostly on if you need vector support.

Right now, I'd recommend the canmv kendryte k230 which has a C908 rvv 1.0 capable core.

If you can wait a bit, mid/end 2024, I'd go for the vision five 3 (or whatever is will be called), as it will have RVA22+V (iirc) or for the sg2380 which has SiFive P570s and X280s both RVA22+V.

If you don't care about vector, then currently anything based on jh7110 should be good.

But if you have the time to deal with very slow execution and the potential need to report hardware bugs, I'd consider benchmarking on rtl simulation of open source cores. (BOOM, tenstorrent-bobcat, XiangShian, ...)

m00dy
4 replies
1d5h

I am one of the fortunate people who could afford to pay a visit to BSC.

capableweb
3 replies
1d4h

Since when does it cost money? I'm fairly sure it used to be free to visit...

manuelabeledo
0 replies
1d3h

It technically does, if you don't live there.

kinow
0 replies
20h34m

It still is. You can just book it with reception directly, or if you attend a meeting or conference. Whenever I get friends in Barcelona I always invite them over too (anyone that works there can request a visitor badge and schedule the visit -- necessary avoid conflicts).

kh_hk
0 replies
1d3h

Must be poor phrasing and choice of words I guess. I concur it's free to visit.

gchadwick
3 replies
1d3h

It's a cool project but I do wish these open source processor initiatives targetted more realistic design points.

In particular there's often a desire to push out of order design into the micro-architecture where the resulting performance just doesn't justify it. In this they're achieving a CoreMark/MHz of 2.44 (from the paper here: https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sarga...). This is very low performance (on a par with the Arm M0+). Now CoreMark certainly isn't the be all and end all of Benchmarks. In particular it has very little relevance to high performance compute or application cores in general. However it's a useful performance smoke test. It is easy to perform well e.g getting close to 1.0 IPC for a single issue design such as Sargantana, CoreMark doesn't really stress the memory system so a major source of stalls that you need to hide latency for just isn't there. So if you're not hitting that you've definitely got work to do on the microarchitecture. They may well have been better off trying to build something simpler and putting more design time into improving the performance of the basic microarchitecture.

The other crucial aspect that's often overlooked is verification. This is a major part of producing a new production quality CPU design and it doesn't appear to be discussed in the paper at all. Maybe once they've released the RTL they'll also release the testbench so you can see what they have done.

phkahler
0 replies
1d3h

Any of these efforts not performing as well as BOOM may be suffering from "not invented here". Its already there and getting good IPC. Why not start from that.

gchadwick
0 replies
1d3h

Though on the CoreMark benchmark they haven't published the IPC achieved. You get a large swing in results depending upon the compiler used and switches (For RV32 at least I've found GCC out-performs LLVM comfortably).

They do have an IPC number for Dhrystone (another tiny benchmark that tells you little about real-world performance but you should be able to perform well on), that looks to be 0.7.

cf1241290841
0 replies
20h9m

I believe we might be at the point where supply chain security (and code base security) might warrant the question why you cant implement something on an M0+.

If you really need higher speeds for reaction time, use an ASIC or FPGA. We already do this with USB3 or Ethernet controllers.

cmrx64
2 replies
1d4h

What about this chip is open source? As far as I can tell, nothing. It frustrates me to no end that closed, secret efforts inherit the “open source” branding just because the specification they implement is participatory and royalty free.

ThePituLegend
1 replies
1d3h

In fact, you can get the RTL here: https://github.com/bsc-loca/sargantana :D

cmrx64
0 replies
1d3h

!!! perfect, thank you. I’m annoyed now at myself for not having found it…

tecleandor
1 replies
1d6h

Interesting. It'd be nice to know if they're going to focus on HPC loads or hobby/consumer too. I should check to see if I still know people around the BSC :P

_fcs
0 replies
1d5h

From the preprint [1] it looks like it is not meant for consumers.

  This way, Sargantana lays the foundations for future RISC-V based core designs able to meet industrial-class performance requirements for scientific, real-time, and high-performance computing applications.
1. <https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sarga...>

pantulis
1 replies
1d3h

Unrelated note: BSC is a location in the unapologetically crazy HBO series "30 coins" season 2, some cool sequences there involving a group visit.

dtjb
0 replies
1d1h

As far as data centers go, it's beautiful. Like something you'd see in a Mission Impossible heist.

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=oj5FSKsTt7o

mkehrt
1 replies
21h18m

So, uh, why's it named after a demon?

snvzz
0 replies
14h27m
DeathArrow
1 replies
1d6h

Any benchmarks? Does it compares to Intel/AMD at raw power? Does it compares with Apple at efficiency?

sylware
0 replies
1d6h

It is in an in-order CPU. It is meant for tasks where prediction and robustness are important. More like hard-ish realtime stuff in nasty environment (or... security? ahem...)

RISC-V moving forward. Good.

rwmj
0 replies
1d5h

Is this based off CVA6? That's not mentioned.

dataking
0 replies
1d2h

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center [...] presented on Wednesday the new Sargantana chip, the third generation of open source processors designed entirely at the BSC.

Researchers from other universities and research centres such as the Centro de Investigación en Computación del Instituto Politécnico Nacional de México (CIC-IPN) [...] have participated in the development of Sargantana.

So this was designed entirely in Spain but it is also joint work with a university in Mexico ;-) Nice project though; I've visited BSC and they do a lot of cool work there.

cf1241290841
0 replies
20h33m

Shout out to affordable subsidized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service

Be it googles OpenMPW Free Silicon Chip Program https://developers.google.com/silicon (still active?)

Or the EU subsidized multi project wafer https://europractice-ic.com/schedules-prices-2023/

MoSattler
0 replies
1d6h
999900000999
0 replies
1d1h

Very cool, I just got a MangoPi and I'm excited to get some stuff running on it.

I imagine RISC-V is the future. None wants to pay licensing fees to Arm