Some US Lawmakers Want to Restrict American Companies From Working on RISC-V Chip Technology (reuters.com) 162
An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:
In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China — a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders...
RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence... The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V...
Executives from China's Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation's progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet's Google saying it will make Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips...
Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a "tremendous tragedy." "It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."
One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was "abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips.
"U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws."
RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence... The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V...
Executives from China's Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation's progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet's Google saying it will make Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips...
Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a "tremendous tragedy." "It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."
One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was "abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips.
"U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws."
compete on the merits (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of working to try to hide tech from our perceived enemies we should be making a plan to compete on a level playing field.
Re:compete on the merits (Score:4, Insightful)
Cannot see the Benefit to the US (Score:5, Insightful)
CCP actively engages in industrial espionage
Right, so if RISC-V was some US-based propriety standard I could at least see the logic in not allowing it to be exported to China. However, it is an open standard so there are no secrets to steal and so I fail to see how there is any benefit at all for the US in preventing its companies from using such an open standard. Indeed, if anything it puts the US at a disadvantage because now it will have to develop equivalent technology while everyone else gets to skip that development cost.
Re:Cannot see the Benefit to the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, if anything it puts the US at a disadvantage because now it will have to develop equivalent technology while everyone else gets to skip that development cost.
Or... restricting US companies from working on RISC-V protects Intel and AMD chips, etc. Seems short-sighted, but it's Congress, so ...
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Or... restricting US companies from working on RISC-V protects Intel and AMD chips, etc.
I have to admit, when I read the summary my immediate thought was this is actually some ham-handed attempt to favor Intel - it's just pretending to be about China.
But it's likely if that were the case, somehow they'd restrict ARM too...
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Exactly the same here, I thought the same thing as you did. Next, they might want to restrict US companies to work on Linux because the Russian and Chinese use it.
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Or... restricting US companies from working on RISC-V protects Intel and AMD chips
I don't really see RISC-V as a competitor to either Intel or AMD. Their CPUs are much more powerful, and power-hungry, than RISC-V so the applications for RISC-V have very little overlap with their CPUs.
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One or two years ago, the most powerful RISC-V core offered a fraction of the performance of the cores in a Raspberry Pi 4. Today, the most powerful RISC-V core offers performance similar to the cores in a Raspberry Pi 4 (but there is a CPU containing 64 of those cores for companies wanting to experiment with server-grade computers based on RISC-V). Within a few years, I expect RISC-V cores to offer laptop/desktop-level performance, and a few years after that RISC-V chips will offer data center-level perfor
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Honestly I picture two situations.
Some Chinese company manages to steal Intel or TSMC's sub 4nm tech, and then implements the RISC-V at that level. While not far fetched, It's not ARM or x86 tech, and it's also not AMD/Intel/Nvidia GPU tech. It's only half the picture, and unless a company was to build a "knights landing" style product, it's not going to help.
The other, less likely scenario, is that the open nature of RISC-V might actually get subverted by China. So American and European companies might wor
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That's been my biggest concern with RISC-V right from the start - not just China, but any company/organisation/government that develops RISC-V chips can build back doors, spyware and other malware into their proprietary forks of the CPU (RISC-V has a "permissive" license like BSD, not a "copyleft" style license like GPL).
And, sure, TPM and similar technologies can (and do) do the same thing with Intel, AMD, and ARM CPUs- the difference is a matter of scale, instead of a small number of such anti-features th
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So, in the sense that someone in the U.S. contributes features to RISC-V, they make those features available to everyone. I can readily imagine Congress freaking out about the knowledge-sharing.
We all know that t
Re:compete on the merits (Score:5, Insightful)
CCP actively engages in industrial espionage, and CCP actively engages in dumping, where they subsidize domestic products to enable below-cost sales with the intent to harm completion.
When dealing with China, applying sanctions is very justified.
How are US agriculture and petroleum subsidies viewed by competitors around the world?
When the NSA director publicly says "Let me be really clear. NSA doesnâ(TM)t just listen to bad people. NSA listens to interesting people. People who are communicating information." what constitutes an "interesting" person?
From Snowden era press accounts NSA also seems to have had a hand in industrial espionage.
https://www.bbc.com/news/25907... [bbc.com]
If one wants to make the argument China is behaving unfairly on a whole different level from other nations that warrant unique and special attention then fine make that case. Yet when one merely brings up general behaviors they are engaged in too it becomes difficult to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy unless one believes others like the US also accepts being on the receiving end of sanctions is also very justified.
I personally think sanctions on China are warranted in response to military aggression and human rights violations yet when it comes to "level playing fields" and competition how much of this is actually driven by large western corporations leveraging state power to avoid competition? I would be willing to bet if you traced the source of lawmakers concerns about open IP for RISC-V processors it was not some organic realization but rather something that was driven by campaign donors with big pockets and a direct conflict of interest.
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I would be willing to bet if you traced the source of lawmakers concerns about open IP for RISC-V processors it was not some organic realization but rather something that was driven by campaign donors with big pockets and a direct conflict of interest.
I'll take that bet. What are the stakes? Who will adjudicate the bet resolution? Idle speculation is not proof of conspiracy.
Re: compete on the merits (Score:2)
Since you asked:
As a European: agriculture subsidies can't really be avoided in our current society, we have them too, if you want affordable food and well paid agricultural workers then you need them.
As a human: subsidising petroleum sounds like shooting yourself in the foot with a rocket launcher then throwing feces on what's left. But hey we subsidise airlines in Europe.
As a human: the NSA is actively working against social progress, it is a cancer on society (one of many).
As a European: not a huge fan o
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says the dude whose country has more people working for free in jail than China...
Re: compete on the merits (Score:4, Interesting)
China doesn't compete on a level playing field. What they do is akin to the US government using taxpayer money to subsidize GM or Ford cars to the foreign markets to kill off their local automotive industries. China's economy also plays by fascist economics, which is basically a twist on free markets where entrepreneurship is allowed, but ultimately they must do everything "for the people", meaning in the interest of the state. When they don't do this, or if they simply gain any significant cultural influence to rival the government itself (for example, by becoming "too wealthy" as progressives put it)...well...google Jack Ma to see what happens.
But in general, yes, I think somehow restricting RISC-V is a bad idea, even if the government simply said that RISC-V is banned from defense contractor spending would even be a bad idea.
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Limiting RISC-V tech hurts everyone. No point in shooting yourself in the foot because the other guy plays dirty. It is not practical to say that we can develop the RISC-V tech and keep it out of China's hands, we would have to stop development to prevent proliferation. In the case of RISC-V tech I don't get it, we can compete whether China has it or not.
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Limiting RISC-V tech hurts everyone.
No, it hurts the Chinese, that the CCP mandated adoption of that specific microprocessor technology, in order to not be "dependent" on US controlled corporate technology products. Currently, there are no significant industries dependent on RISC-V products. In fact, there's no real commercial reason to adopt RISC-V technologies at all. Its just an open license microprocessor technology that can be tweaked until China is motivated to mass produce it as a pillar of their military products.
How does the disco
Re: compete on the merits (Score:2)
It's a short sighted take resulting in unfree, protectionist behavior and is ultimately futile.
Banning people from designing CPUs in the open is like trying to keep people from working on cryptography.
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You can only compete on merit if you actually are good at some things...
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Time to make a plan.
Seems a bit stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical lawmakers don't really understand the situation.
Just because an American firm is working on RISC-V designs for their own use, doesn't mean China automatically gets those designs. Or any element of them.
Re:Seems a bit stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
And inversely, just because a design is proprietary doesn't mean China isn't able to get that design (through 3rd-parties, corporate espionage, reverse engineering, ...). That may be more difficult than an open-source design, but it's far from a big obstacle to a big nation such as China.
Re:Seems a bit stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Typical lawmakers don't really understand the situation.
Just because an American firm is working on RISC-V designs for their own use
Typical slashdotters don't understand the issue being discussed. The issue is not RISC-V designs for your own use, the issue is working on development of the architecture with the Swiss non-profit. RISC-V isn't just some singular document that was laid down once with the only thing left to do being implementing it yourself, it's a continuously developed architecture with contribution from all over the world. Just because you're not required to upstream your development and improvements doesn't mean that many American companies aren't doing just that.
The lawmakers are taking aim at the USA contributions being opened up to everyone, since that superset "everyone" includes China.
Re: Seems a bit stupid (Score:5, Informative)
No, you are not required to release the design. RISC-V is an instruction set, you can implement it in a proprietary manner -- your don't have to release the code. Only RISC-V and its ratified extensions are open source.
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also you can create your own proprietary extention without telling anyone
Re: Seems a bit stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, as RISC-V is open source, any design added IS bound by license to open source it.
That is not what "open source" means, and the RISC-V license does not require changes to be given back. Proprietary extensions are explicitly permitted for both development and production.
Here's the RISC-V FAQ [riscv.org]. Questions about the license are at the top.
Many people conflate "open source" with the GPL, which requires "givebacks" for extensions that are distributed. But, many other licenses, including BSD, Apache, and MIT, do not require givebacks and are still considered open source. Many people consider them more open than the GPL.
Re: Seems a bit stupid (Score:4, Informative)
The GPL also doesn't require that, if your use is in-house. Only if you sell it, and only to those you sold it to. (But you can't restrict them from sharing the code.)
Actually there are a lot more details, but the way I've always used it is to ship the source code with the binary. That suffices. The GPL was written before internet sites were common, and allows various things like mailing the source code, but separating them was always too complex for me to bother with.
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Doesn't matter whether you sell the binary or give it away, the GPL covers distribution. 4th paragraph of the preamble to GPL v2,
I'll leave it to you to read the actual license rather then copy and pasting it here as I'd have to paste
LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
How do nationalist idiots keep coming up with a fusillade of nonsensical BS every day? Devolving humanity into some tribalist BS is not going to end well for anyone, that's the first thing. We need to science out why fools become so tribalist and evil and then figure out how to make humans docile and get along with everyone. It might be some genetic shit, maybe some people need CRISPR gene editing or some shit like that.
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disturbing
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But that would force people to break off and do smaller tribes in order to become relevant.
I'm not sure how you correlate reduced propensity to resort to violence with herd mentality. If we look at herd vs. non-herd animal does not correlate with aggressive non-aggressive. I mean you get aggressive packs of Cape hunting dogs or hyenas, but then you also get docile herbivore herds. You get individualistic aggressive tigers and laid-back sloths. I'm not calling for society to become a large herd. You can be non-aggressive and not want to join a herd. I'm saying there are probably some genes that
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gene editing allowed peace in the novel Children of Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Devolving humanity into some tribalist BS is not going to end well for anyone, that's the first thing. We need to science out why fools become so tribalist and evil and then figure out how to make humans docile and get along with everyone. It might be some genetic shit, maybe some people need CRISPR gene editing or some shit like that.
This person wants their kids and their kids' kids to learn Mandarin.
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How do you figure I want that? I am against ANY tribal bullshit including joining the Chinese/commie tribe you idiot.
Re: LOL (Score:2)
Re:Four words (Score:5, Informative)
This is also the media horse race syndrome since the mainstream Republican voter view and the words of the likely candidate include such gems as "A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,"
This is the literal mainstream conservative view, you don't even have to go to the extremist side where many are outright looking to actually install autocracy.
extreme positions in the Democratic party
And yet the only thing cited is something that has nothing to do with federal or even state politics, just culture war. Now the alternative media does a terrific job of making this "issue" feel like a national problem in some way but what are the actual "extreme Democratic positions". I am not talking about ones you disagree with but actual policies implemented that have had extreme outcomes.
I'd love to see the left and the right compete for best leadership
Sure, I would also love a sane and actually moral (not this empty grandstanding they partake in now) Republican party but without a major defeat they are lost to Trumpism, populism and grievance. There was an era where the Republicans had the reputation of being the pragmatic policy wonks with principled economic and governmental policies (imo wrong but at least consistent) but that is long long gone.
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the dems should respond to and shut down anything crackpot republicans set their sights on?
the culture war is ENDLESS.
try again.
Re:Four words (Score:4, Insightful)
Four words: Drag queen story hour.
So in a discussion about the RISC-V instruction set, your first thoughts are about men dressing in funny clothes? Well hey if that's what floats your boat then let's talk about drag queen story hour. How about some good fashioned family entertainment. Jackie Gleason and Bob Hope fit the bill. They would never dress up as women on prime time television. https://www.cinema-crazed.com/... [cinema-crazed.com]
Here's Milton Berle in drag back in 1950. https://www.gettyimages.com/de... [gettyimages.com]
So now Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, and Bob Hope are groomers indoctrinating children?
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How do nationalist idiots keep coming up with a fusillade of nonsensical BS every day
Four words: Drag queen story hour.
The extremists in the Democratic party are causing voters to run screaming to the other side.
Nothing wrong with the core Democratic beliefs, I'm a fan of several of them despite being a staunch conservative, but the far extreme left is so radical it's seen as a threat to our nation. Literally.
Not making that up, the extreme positions in the Democratic party are a source of scare and panic that's being amplified by the right-wing media, and it'll only get worse over the next year because of the election. Insults and bitter hatred thrown at the right only make the problem worse.
I'd love to see the left and the right compete for best leadership, but we live in a world where everything is skewed and manipulated by big players and rational thought is all but impossible.
You have moderate Democrat candidates funding the campaigns of their opposing, most extreme right wing, Republican candidates. And vice versa, Republicans funding extreme Democrat candidates.
Because its easier for a moderate to run against someone who is frothing far left/right nutjob. Doesn't matter left or right, it works just the same.
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"The extremists in the Democratic party are causing voters to run screaming to the other side."
The article specifically mentions GOP politicians Mark Rubio, Mike Gallagher, and Mike McCaul.
The loaded premises people talk about. (Score:2, Interesting)
They are a fundamental threat to our security and survival, and every claim that trade would make them less dangerous has proven to be a lie. Not that anyone credible ever believed it to begin with.
Re: The loaded premises people talk about. (Score:2)
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... a fake democracy that is even more rotten to the core as the publicly undemocratic China.
I've encountered this point before, but I've never understood why the US is worse than China as far as democracy goes. Can you point to anything in particular?
Thanks.
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China doesn't make a secret of the fact it is NOT a democracy, this is predictable.
The USA are LYING about their status as a democracy, and the treatment you get from various state entities depends on a whole lot of factors.
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A Loaded Question (Score:2)
We shouldn't be trading with undemocratic states in the first place. None of them, ever.
So how would you deal with a state that holds an election between two candidates and then appoints the candidate with the fewest votes as the leader?
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So how would you deal with a state that holds an election between two candidates and then appoints the candidate with the fewest votes as the leader?
I presume you're referring to the U.S. Presidential elections. Those elections are not won by the popular vote, but rather by the Electoral College vote. It exists (among other reasons) to give less populous states a larger voice than they would otherwise have. Otherwise no one in those states would bother to vote at all since they would always be drowned out by the more populous states.
Re: A Loaded Question (Score:3)
That is idiotic. If everyone's vote is worth the same then nobody's vote is more drowned out than anyone else's, since every vote is worth the same. If anything, the votes having less value are the ones from people in more populous states in the current situation.
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The whole "republic" thing you are likely referring to aside, first-past-the-post is one of the shittiest, weakest forms of democracy available. Canada also suffers from this blight.
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While it is more functional then the American system, partially due to the design of our Confederation, eg Municipal, Provincial and Federal elections being split allowing more parties or in 2 of the Territories, no parties, it is still a first past the post system with 2 parties that take turns running the country.
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Exactly. First-past-the-post is a blight on democratic systems. Corporations that want governmental influence LOVE it though. Makes it easy for Post Media to shape opinions and the course of politics.
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The problem is what to replace it with. At least we are lucky in the sense that our Constitution doesn't say much about our democracy besides needing to have elections at least every 5 years, so an act of Parliament could change it. Unluckily the 2 main parties love the first past the post system.
Even a weakening of the party system would help. I mean the whipping of party members to vote as a block and support the leader. Looking at the Liberals for example, they could use a new leader but the party is set
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I think you are under the misapprehension that I am American: I am Canadian. Our dumpster fire is just slightly smaller than the one to the south.
We do indeed share first-past-the-post with the U.S. The fact that we have more/different checks and balances doesn't change the fact that we also wind up with a (mostly) 2 party system.
There's an excellent CGP Grey video explaining the mathematics of FPTP that demonstrates how this is the inevitable outcome of such voting systems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?.. [youtube.com]
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looks like some shit fail, like glorifying nazis in the parliament...
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You are either the kind of idiot who thinks "republic" is an antonym of "democracy," or the other kind of idiot who denies anything other than an anarcho-syndicalist drum circle is a democracy.
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The US is a democracy, admittedly not a full one. It's a flawed one, right there on the democracy index between Israel and Slovenia, and a couple steps up from Botswana.
Attempting to prevent China.. (Score:5, Insightful)
... from developing tech is futile and will backfire
What happens if they become the tech leader and refuse to share with us?
Re:Attempting to prevent China.. (Score:4, Insightful)
What happens if they become the tech leader and refuse to share with us?
They won't and they would refuse to share if they had something. Chinese society under CCP is incapable of innovating at the same rate as open market economies. CCP social and economical policies give them greater control over population but the main trade-off is that enforced conformance is antithetical to innovation.
Our congress is shoots itself in the foot again (Score:5, Insightful)
No need to fix the budget deficit -- an angoing problem for decades. Just kick the can 30, 45, 60, or 90 days.
Let's focus on impeaching a guy for which there is no evidence. Maybe if we keep fishing the water will all of a sudden contain fish is not a good strategy.
And now this.
RISC-V is a technology which will allow democratization of CPU chip design (and if there was a budget even GPU design). It's open-source and many people from all over the world, not just Murka, work on it. Right now it's 25% the speed of ARM-64 or X86_64 in terms of MIPS or FLOPS. This will change, but --again-- the budgets of e.g. Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, are resources the FOSS (and hardware) communities will not be able to match.
Congress should stick to what it knows best -- corruption, grift, infighting, acting like small narcissistic children, namecalling, and being little shits. They should stay out of stuff the know-nothing know-nothing about, which is Ukraine, Economics, "Big Tech" regulation, and stick to accepting bribes from Comcast and AT&T lobbyists to prevent municipal broadband networks, the crimes of the ex-president, the crimes of a house representative who lied too many times to be remembered, and a twice convicted bribe taking New Jerse senator (surprising... corruption from New Jersey...) let alone SCOTUS "justices" who get free houses, boats, jet trips to vacation getaways, book royalties, but don't report on them... because accountability is only for the little people.
E
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RISC-V is a technology which will allow democratization of CPU chip design (and if there was a budget even GPU design).
Yes, and that's what has them worried. Right now the most powerful CPUs on the planet come from and are controlled by Intel and AMD (plus TSMC.) Two American companies literally have the #1 and #2 spots, and oh yeah, #3 is IBM. And hey, I wonder what the GPU market looks like, well looky here, nvidia and AMD followed by Intel.
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I might add especially for my down modder, kiss kiss that previously we also had MIPS and SPARC and HP-PA and 68k and basically every dominant architecture on the planet. It's only recently that ARM became a high performance processor again since its earliest days, and that only because we began to care enough about power consumption (both to get more battery life and because we reached practical limits of our ability to cost effectively transfer heat) to consider moving away from the dominant and familiar
Re: Our congress is shoots itself in the foot agai (Score:2)
Meh (Score:3)
I get why they could see it this way, from a luddite politician perspective but if Intel, NVidia, Qualcomm, Apple and AMD, all American firms can't stay ahead of RISC-V then there are serious issues beyond this.
Also the real issue will be China doesn't contribute back to RISC-V
Re: Meh (Score:2)
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Sorry i forgot the "if" in that sentence
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But China does contribute back.
In what way?
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China provides with enormous trade; you buy and are the beneficiary of chinese electronics for example.
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can't stay ahead of RISC-V
It's not an issue of not staying ahead. It's an issue of preventing "good enough". When talking about technological dominance from a military perspective there's only so much you can do. Once you hit "good enough" you don't get an advantage from "better".
You can see how this has played out in modern tank warfare. We're now at the point where there's little purpose to designing new tanks. Anti-tank weaponry is just too damn good, and an infantry can launch 10 anti-tank javelins at a tank for the same cost as
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True but in that fashion the previous gains from mastery of something else also leads into gains in other areas. Now even though CPU chips are evening out the new frontier is all GPU and "AI" processors where again, the leading companies are the "Western" companies, much like the US has some of the most advanced anti-tank weaponry along with the only actual fleet of 5th gen fighters (2 of them no less) because we've already built a fleet of 4 and 4.5 gen and the 6th gen is already in the works.
In my opini
WTF are they smoking? (Score:2)
oh wow... (Score:2)
I knew there was a lot of dumb ass people in the US...
wouldn't have imagine they are dumb at THAT level though !
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No, you need to rethink the whole dumb thing. People are morons in many different ways, and old lawyers/politicians are really, really dumb on technology. The know less than their own 12 year olds. Plus you have to factor in cynical blinders -- if they think setting fire to nuns to solve the disappearing socks problem makes them look good to their voters, they'll pretend to not know nuns are not the ones hiding people's socks. They'll say/do anything, ANYTHING, no matter how destructive it is to their c
One of the law makers indicating this (Score:5, Informative)
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EXCELLENT of you to point this out.
For the lazy: "Congressman Michael McCaul, who represents Texas's 10th congressional district, remains one of the most active stock market traders in Congress. ... Rep. McCaul invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Intel (INTC:US) on October 13, according to filings."
Clueless as always (Score:3)
Lawmakers showing their ignorance again. While is mostly possible to tape out a basic RISC-V processor using one of the open designs, each manufacturer has their own design, if a company figured out how to implement RISC-5 in a way that left intel and arm in the dust, they would keep that to itself.
However, even if they were openly sharing, it would make no difference. China has no regard for intellectual property, if they want something they will just copy it. At least in an open environment, other countries can benefit from what China contributes.
The problem is many western countries, especially the USA and UK have very high opinions of their own place in the world, they see themselves as intellectually superior and countries like China as backward. While there are many failings and much not to like about the Chinese government, they are fast becoming one of the world’s largest economies, and as a result they are developing a high standard of education, whereas education standards in the US and UK have fallen dramatically due to underinvestment.
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However, even if they were openly sharing
RISC-V is actively developed and contributed heavily by organisations. It's not a matter of being better than intel, it's a matter of having minimum capabilities. When you have met a required capability it really doesn't matter if someone else is better or not.
Ineffective (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with wanting to put pressure on China over concrete things (potential invasion of Taiwan, efforts to control lives of people of Chinese ethnicity in other countries, poor civil rights, etc). This is not an intelligent way to do it; export controls won't work with a country like China.
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They're trying very hard to pressure China into developing a local chip industry. (Not just a bunch of fabs for things designed elsewhere.)
RISC-V is an ISA... (Score:2)
I totally don't understand this political stuff. RISC-V brings to the table a nice architecture, and has been used in the US for many years for MCUs such as HDD controllers.
The key is for US makers to keep ahead. Nothing wrong with RISC-V, and even if the US is pulled away from it, it will improve by leaps and bounds regardless, so it is in America's best interest to keep with it. I've seen newer RISC-V boards from China, even with a backlevel kernel and antediluvian software put out some amazing perform
Did anyone else notice... (Score:2)
That they didn't name any names of those, supposedly, making all the noise in congress?
Wonder why THAT is?????
This Makes Sense (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I totally read the sentence from the summary as:
Can't have that. Sounds socialist.
CCP abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. IP dominance (Score:2)
One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was "abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips. "U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws."
Oh, cry me a river!! Isn't that what the free market is all about? Challenging old dominant players through bold and clever competition? The (R) faction can make good on this threat but all it will achieve is leave the playing field empty for the Chinese and maybe Europeans and others to claim market share while America stays at home and sulks. You have to compete, if you don't you get left behind, and it takes a long time to catch up.
Idiots (Score:3)
This is dumb on two levels -- This is (partially) open source, so the same logic implies we should not compete with Microsoft. And Risc V has plenty of proprietary crap going on and there's no need to make everything open anyhow.
Re: (Score:2)
I was going to go for "Morons", but either works.
Not Entirely Wrong (Score:2)
They're not entirely wrong. If the world moves from ARM to RISC-V, that eliminates one way that we can restrict China from using advanced technology. But it's a very weak restriction. If China is fabbing the chips themselves, it's irrelevant, but for advanced chips, they're contracting with TSMC or Samsung, so it's just one more way of telling those companies not to fab things for China.
When you get down to restrictions that really matter, the issue is restricting fabs from selling chips to China.
And the
Re: (Score:2)
Also ARM architecture licenses are expensive and AI accelerators need custom instructions.
Re: (Score:2)
ARM is getting replaced by RISC-V in all the places ARM has dominated for most of the same reasons ARM came to dominance.
For Qualcomm it's probably just a negotiating chip (Score:2)
AFAICS ARM can't extract much money from Apple, but they are trying to bleed Qualcomm dry. RISC-V is probably just a negotiating tool for them. Not just using ARM is a pain in the ass, but if ARM gets unreasonable they might be forced into it.
Fine, leave the US behind (Score:2)
Those that do not want to participate in important stuff are doing it to themselves.
Ship sailed (Score:2)
Should I point out that China's not-so-secret top HPCs which get bigger all the time by adding more boxes runs MIPS?
The Chinese government can order the world's largest AI HPC from Huawei with full pangu and pytorch support from Huawei and get it delivered in weeks.
The US can order the world's largest AI HPC from NVidia,
In other news... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
so they're not US persons any more.
You're welcome.
Well thats the thing, its this part;
"U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws."
What this is really about is controlling what Americans can and cannot do. This is about the US government interfering in the freedoms of Americans.