The Next Front in the US-China Battle Over Chips (nytimes.com) 87
A U.S.-born chip technology called RISC-V has become critical to China's ambitions. Washington is debating whether and how to limit the technology. From a report: It evolved from a university computer lab in California to a foundation for myriad chips that handle computing chores. RISC-V essentially provides a kind of common language for designing processors that are found in devices like smartphones, disk drives, Wi-Fi routers and tablets. RISC-V has ignited a new debate in Washington in recent months about how far the United States can or should go as it steadily expands restrictions on exporting technology to China that could help advance its military. That's because RISC-V, which can be downloaded from the internet for free, has become a central tool for Chinese companies and government institutions hoping to match U.S. prowess in designing semiconductors.
Last month, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party -- in an effort spearheaded by Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin -- recommended that an interagency government committee study potential risks of RISC-V. Congressional aides have met with members of the Biden administration about the technology, and lawmakers and their aides have discussed extending restrictions to stop U.S. citizens from aiding China on RISC-V, according to congressional staff members. The Chinese Communist Party is "already attempting to use RISC-V's design architecture to undermine our export controls," Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the House select committee, said in a statement. He added that RISC-V's participants should be focused on advancing technology and "not the geopolitical interests of the Chinese Communist Party."
Arm Holdings, a British company that sells competing chip technology, has also lobbied officials to consider restrictions on RISC-V, three people with knowledge of the situation said. Biden administration officials have concerns about China's use of RISC-V but are wary about potential complications with trying to regulate the technology, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The debate over RISC-V is complicated because the technology was patterned after open-source software, the free programs like Linux that allow any developer to view and modify the original code used to make them. Such programs have prompted multiple competitors to innovate and reduce the market power of any single vendor.
Last month, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party -- in an effort spearheaded by Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin -- recommended that an interagency government committee study potential risks of RISC-V. Congressional aides have met with members of the Biden administration about the technology, and lawmakers and their aides have discussed extending restrictions to stop U.S. citizens from aiding China on RISC-V, according to congressional staff members. The Chinese Communist Party is "already attempting to use RISC-V's design architecture to undermine our export controls," Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the House select committee, said in a statement. He added that RISC-V's participants should be focused on advancing technology and "not the geopolitical interests of the Chinese Communist Party."
Arm Holdings, a British company that sells competing chip technology, has also lobbied officials to consider restrictions on RISC-V, three people with knowledge of the situation said. Biden administration officials have concerns about China's use of RISC-V but are wary about potential complications with trying to regulate the technology, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The debate over RISC-V is complicated because the technology was patterned after open-source software, the free programs like Linux that allow any developer to view and modify the original code used to make them. Such programs have prompted multiple competitors to innovate and reduce the market power of any single vendor.
Open... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open... (Score:4)
Do politicians not know what the word "open" means???
No, they don't. They also lack any knowledge of history, such as the disastrous crypto restrictions of the 1990s that criminalized t-shirts.
Export of cryptography from the United States [wikipedia.org]
The outcome of this current idiocy will be the same as in the 1990s: Companies will shift development outside the US to avoid the restrictions. America will fall behind. Much of the offshored development will be done in China since a big high-tech labor pool is available.
The outcome will be the exact opposite of what the politicians intend.
This is predictable, just as in the 1990s, yet they will do it anyway.
Re:Open... (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. But there are much older reference cases showing that protectionism is futile and only makes matters worse. My favorite one is "Made in Germany". Back in 1887, the UK made a law that "inferior" foreign products, strong among them German steel-ware like knives, needed to be marked to customers could instead buy superior British knives. Turns out the german steel was a _lot_ better and not it was easy to identify and people very mich preferred it to the inferior Britisch stuff. And since then, "Made in Germany" is a sign of quality, when it was intended to be exactly the opposite.
Re:Open... (Score:5, Insightful)
Protectionism has it's place. When you are trying to jumpstart your own industry, it's the way to go. You need to - wait for it - protect your fledgling industry from the real world, lest the real world eat it alive. Much like a baby. But once the baby grows, you allow it to get around more and more, until it is based enough to make it on it's own.
But both your British example and the current US/Trump trade war are the opposite of that. They are about protecting a downhill trajectory industry from an uphill trajectory newcomer. Which could technically be solved in exactly the same way, but the problem with a downhill trajectory is that it is coupled with an incompetent leadership that does not know how to build things, only how to squeeze the juice out of past accomplishments. Add to the roadblock of arrogance, which results in a lack of analasys and vision, and you are set off to shoot yourself in the foot in a major way.
The case for the British was that they never really liked the industrial revolution, they just were the ones to stumble on it. But for what they actually thought of it, check out the Arts and Crafts movement, the works of Morris and Ruskin, and the German answer to the British confusion - the Deutscher Werkbund. Basically the British discovered that industrial production had turned everything into crap, so they kinda ran out of enthusiasm. The Germans on the other hand decided that well, maybe we should produce quality stuff instead, and made the home run that they still mostly are, although if you look around in Germany, you can see the glory days are over.
The US problem is that what made it prosper - physical security, abundant natural resources, constant enterprising immigration - and especially after WWII - the inheriting of all of Europe's brains, tech and empires, has been squandered away in 50 years of neoliberal rule. The working class has been destroyed and the middle class is bleeding, the industrial base has been exported to China to the tune of trillions of corporate profit, the institutional knowledge and experience of actually making things has been thrown into the wind by private equity looting, and maybe most importantly, the political system has been pimping itself out to the monied class to such an extent that it has become inconceivable that anything other than free money to govt buddies is a valid, or achievable economic policy...
The end result is that since the US political and economical system does actually not have the will neither the capacity to actually direct industry development, the only thing that can and will happen is that the govt cronies will take their subsidies as always, and deliver nothing as always, but the US will deny itself the export and import markets it needs for it's industries to prosper. At the same time China will learn how to build the three things that it does still has trouble with, and once they get there, the US will have nothing for sale that you can not get cheaper and better from China. At this point in time the US will have to be rebuilt piece by piece from ground up, if they ever want to be anything but a starving on top of the depleted midwestern aquifier, with no export power to save it, but of course there will be a civil war or three before there is a hope to rebuild anything. Because the sad thing about the human being is that it really needs to go through a few years of mindless bloodshed before it comes to the point where it will consider that maybe, just maybe, the thinking that led up to it was a bit off...
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This is a very nice analysis! And you are correct that there are some very specific circumstances were protectionism is a good idea and usually works.
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squandered away in 50 years of neoliberal rule.
At the same time China will learn how to build the three things that it does still has trouble with, and once they get there, the US will have nothing for sale that you can not get cheaper and better from China.
Nice analysis, aside from a few points. First, liberal/progressive political rule in the US has diminished significantly in the last 50 years. Just count the number of years with Republican presidents and Congresses and the conservative dominance of the judiciary that has been building over many decades. So, in terms of the progression of US political policy, a characterization of the US as increasingly conservative is more accurate.
Second, the thing that will save the US from Chinese dominance is that C
Re:Open... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok let me try to unravel the politics a bit. Neoliberalism is not much tied to the liberal/conservative axis, especially when these isms are understood to mean a stance on social issues. A famous example would be Thatcher, who was quite the conservative, but at the same time made her country the patient zero of neoliberalism, a move that ushered in the deidustrialization of Britain and culminated in Brexit and the status of a failed state on the horizon for them. What she also did is she gave the script to Reagan, who set in motion all of the same across the pond too...
The thing with modern politics is that you need to be able to separate the social and economic policies. Because whatever the party, or a Western country for that matter, the economic policy is the same everywhere by now. And that the same is that money gets what it wants, and what it wants is basically the same everywhere too - cut business expenses, that is regulation, open up for looting everything that has value stored, and turn every societal process and state function into a revenue stream for someone.
The ugly thing unsolvable is that this kind of policy is what drives the most donations to campaigns and parties. So it has won the competition in a landslide and everyone has adopted it. What also comes with it is that no politician has to understand anything anymore, because the decision logic is alway the same - do what the donors want, and use the donor money to sell it to the public.
What differs in this is how it is being sold to voter. You have parties that present to the voters a socially liberal outlook, and parties that present to the voters a socially conservative outlook. So one party constructs a chain of logic and/or emotion that appeals to their voters, and the other party does their own. And it works quite like magic, because as you can see in the US example, the liberal/conservative outlook goes pretty much 50/50 across the populace. But the end result is the same, because the party donors are the same. All of them give the same money to everyone. They don't care who wins. They will get everything they ask for, all the same. But what you get is jack: https://www.cambridge.org/core... [cambridge.org]
The systematic disassembly of the US that I described in the upper post has been going on for 50 years, all the same without a hiccup, whichever party has been in power. Both parties are doing the same thing. Feeding the war machine to the tune of trillions, with millions dead overseas. Moving entire industires offshore and telling the jobless to adapt in a dynamic economy, that is to suck it. Driving down wages and their safety net to the point where two thirds of the country is one emergency room visit away from being homeless. Sacklers, Epstein... All of this is bipartisan like nothing else. Yes there is a conservative turn, because Democrats are proudly touting their neoliberal policies, while Republicans hide theirs behind neoconservatism, and people are picking up that the guy who takes credit for destroying their life talks a liberal talk. But on the backdrop of nonchanging economic policy, which is what sets the course for the country and the standard of life for everyone, choosing between a liberal and a conservative social direction is like arguing beer over wine in a soup kitchen line.
What is also important is that the Democrats have become quite weak in actually wielding power. Whatever kerfuffle is going on at whatever time, in the end they always seem to fold to Republican pressure. Maybe they don't believe in their legitimacy anymore, maybe they fielded their proposals only for voter attention anyway, maybe it's just that they are everyone too busy milking their own opportunity and nobody cares to maintain the party for the next guy anymore. Hillary's emails give quite the perspective on the latter really,
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The thing with China is that they put great effort into having competent people in the positions that are calling the shots, and they are getting results, and have been getting them for quite some time now. Whether Winnie wants to be the king until he dies will not change that much.
It is unknown whether the key people in the Chinese government are competent. What is known is that they are loyal to Xi, because the questionably loyal have been tagged as corrupt and removed. The big question is whether the breathtaking economic rise of China has been due to favorable circumstances or competence. It has likely been a combination of the two, but in the future, China may have to rely more on its supposedly competence. It's not at all clear, but we'll get the chance to find out in the ne
Re:Open... (Score:4, Informative)
I mean you need both the circumstances, and the competence. Like when the US came knocking on the door with their factories to offshore, there was the circumstance. But to understand the US on a deep enough level to see that it was not there to help China - the usual mistake a country does when onshoring foreign interest - nor that it was there to help itself, which would already have been while not the bullseye call, but still one with a possibly good outcome given a good plan... To understand that the US was there for the nihilist self-interest of the monied class, and that it was therefore willing to transfer technology to go along with the factories, that it was willing to sell itself off for peanuts; to seize on the opportunity and bag the one who was thinking he was doing the bagging, that was not just competence, but balls.
Were it not for the competence to seize the opportunity, China would have been yet another neocolonial subject pariah providing cheap labour and getting the short end of the deal in return. Were it not for the opportunity, the competence would have had nowhere to go. But given both, they were able to pull the whole mom's spaghetti and make history. And because the US self-betrayal has come to fruitition by now, the press and politics on China is /bitter/, oh boy it's bitter, and because of that we also have to take into account that we are self-inflicting a visibility loss into what is actually going on there.
Where then is our understanding of China, deep enough to see through to what is really driving what is going on there, our masterplan to bag them? Nowhere to be found, because any attempt for a real analysys will need to point out the strenghts of the opponent, and doing that gets shot down as opponent propaganda in an instant. All we can have as a result is the run-of-the mill drivel of authoritarianism, lack of democracy and whatnot, the usual book we pull on anyone we don't like, great to manufacture popular discontent against them, but useless to actually do something about them... Impotent grumbling is what it is.
But reduced visibility or not, I think it should be obvious that one does not go waltzing through four decades of industrial, financial and technological policy success, and raising a billion people out of poverty in the process, without having competence on your side more times than not. And you can actually read up on it if you so care.
In any case for the problems they are facing, your take is a perfectly good sceptical read on the matters, and I see no problems with it. Keep up the good work.
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Competition is not the only thing. Much like in the nature, contrary to the neoliberal bible, most of what drives anything is actually cooperation. Monopolies, though, are cancer indeed.
But the argument about China cloning tech is just bull. Any industrial power except the first one - Britain - started by cloning others. Anything anybody really does starts by cloning others, unless you really actually stumble upon the .000001% that is actually never been done before. The need for the China cloning argument
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thinking.
can not pooh bear just tell his geniuses to create risk 5 chips.
or be capped and the bill of 1 dollar be sent to their family.
it worked for mao
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Open == someone bigger eats your lunch.
Look at what Bruce Perens wrote recently about the post open source environment. What did all those volunteers and contributors get of their 20 years of efforts?
Not freedom, not free stuff, just more lock, control and surveillance than ever before with the advent of the cloud! The original authors don't even get a pay day, Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Apple just use their stuff and at most say 'thanks and please patch this for us'
Its frankly delusional to think China and PR
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I agree, but restricting the use of RISC-V by us isn't going to affect China at all and will only hurt us.
The RISC-V architecture is open, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't restrict exports of material and proprietary knowledge to China; the two issues are completely
Re: Open... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Look at what Bruce Perens wrote recently about the post open source environment. What did all those volunteers and contributors get of their 20 years of efforts?"
Bruce Perens promoted open source as if it were equivalent to Free Software. He literally helped bring that situation about, but has absolutely zero awareness of what he's done. As such you will derive little benefit from reading what he thinks of it. He's avoiding thinking about it fully because he'd have to admit his culpability.
Open Source means exactly one thing: you can see the source. Anything else anyone thinks it means is actually specific to a license. Free Software means the software can actually be used. That's why the current version of the GPL has an anti-tivoization clause.
Open source is a gift to corporations. GPL is a gift to everyone.
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"Open source" is a synonym for "free software". It has been from the beginning and was always intended to be. Here is an article [opensource.com] by the person who coined the term explaining how it was chosen, and that the only goal was to avoid confusion:
The argument was as follows: those new to the term "free software" assume it is referring to the price. Oldtimers must then launch into an explanation, usually given as follows: "We mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer." At this point, a discussion on software has turned into one about the price of an alcoholic beverage. The problem was not that explaining the meaning is impossible--the problem was that the name for an important idea should not be so confusing to newcomers. A clearer term was needed. No political issues were raised regarding the free software term; the issue was its lack of clarity to those new to the concept.
RMS later decided he liked his own term better, so he tried to spread confusion about it by claiming open source was based on a different philosophy from free software. It's not true. Do a point by point comparison of the official definitions of open source [opensource.org] and free so [gnu.org]
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"Open source" is a synonym for "free software". It has been from the beginning
Some of us were using it for years before Christine Petersen claims to have invented it. She says she's not aware of that; well no shit, that's why she's not qualified to claim she invented it. Bill Joy said it in an interview in 1986. The OSI is collectively and willfully perpetrating a fraud about the origin of the phrase.
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Do you have a citation for it being used before then? For what it's worth, Google Ngram Viewer [google.com] shows hardly any use of the term until the late 90s, when it suddenly exploded. Earlier use of the term is largely in the context of open source intelligence, which is unrelated.
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http://web.archive.org/web/202... [archive.org]
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Open source is a gift to corporations. GPL is a gift to everyone.
This is too dim of a view. GPL is a subset of Open Source; therefore, Open Source is even more Free than GPL ... and you want to cast that as a negative because it bothers you that people might be able to take and NOT give back.
Your attitude reeks of the same crap that commercial vendors worship. But, that is EXACTLY why Richard Stallman created the original GPL, so you are in good company.
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This is too dim of a view. GPL is a subset of Open Source
GPL goes BEYOND what Open Source does. It is not inferior to it.
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Do politicians not know what the word "open" means???
Yes, but... SECURITY!!! Besides, if it's "technology" it must belong to the USA. Because foreigners are too stupid to invent anything.
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Sure they do. If not, ARM will definitely tell them about what a threat it is.
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Do politicians not know what the word "open" means???
Politicians know that with a stroke of a pen they can change it to "closed". That is how the law works.
In this case it is a bit like closing the barn door after the horses escape. The knowledge is already out in the world. They can only restrict future contributions and sharing. Which will slow the pace of development, but for everyone, not just for their enemies.
In some cases, such as nuclear weapons proliferation, that is good enough. In others, it is a waste of effort.
The restrictions on sales of ad
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What is there to limit? (Score:5, Interesting)
RISC-V is NOT A CPU DESIGN. It is an design for an instruction set and a rather simple one to boot. There are quite a few
designs for RISC-V chips in Verilog on GitHub and a really good tutorial (look for Bruno Levy). None of these are official,
all of them are open and all of them work. I have programmed RISC-V designs on FPGAs I got on GitHub. It is reall not all
that hard to design one.
You can buy the book with the specs in any bookshop and read it on the Internet, it is just an architectural description,
basically MIPS redesigned by the original MIPS team or David Patterson and his students which has been cleaned of
warts and lessons learned over the last 30 years. Even MIPS stopped making MIPS and now only do RISC-V because
it is very similar in any case.
MIPS is a tech the Chinese have had for years, every seccond router has a IPS chip in it, and the Chinese already build them. They
already have the lead on implementations of RISC-V chips, you can almost buy a 16 core desktop machine for $1500 and embedded
RISC-V is going places. All made in China.
As an aside, The RISC-V Reader, is a very good piece of documentation. No fluff, just the facts, very clearly written.
What is there to limit?? Any decent Chinese EE student can build one and if the specs are denied they would just
design a similar chip. None of this is brain surgery. Implementing it on 3mm ASIC IS brain surgery, this is what the
government should look at.
Warts [Re:What is there to limit?] (Score:2)
> [RISC-V is] MIPS redesigned by the original MIPS team or David Patterson and his students which has been cleaned of warts and lessons learned over the last 30 years.
I'd like to know what those improvements are. Also, is there a critique of currently available RISC processors (ARM vs. RISC-V vs. SPARC v9 vs. POWER) available somewhere?
Since SPARC is supposedly a freely licensed architecture, I'm also curious what advantages RISC-V has in licensing over SPARC.
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> d like to know what those improvements are.
For one thing, RISC-V does not have branch delay slots. They also took out any flag registers, but this is arather controversial choice, the ARM designers think this is nuts. RISC-V also tries to bring back the old vector processor idea of Cray as opposed to SIMD instructions although I don't think this has been implemented much.
One thing that RISC-V banks on is instruction fusion in the pipeline. This is one reason they ditched status flags, and several instr
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have discussed extending restrictions to stop U.S. citizens from aiding China on RISC-V, according to congressional staff members.
I believe what they are focused on is limiting companies like Sifive and other design houses from selling advanced CPU designs that happen to execute the RISC-V ISA to Chinese customers. That does fall under export c
It's all a bunch of tubes (Score:2)
Yes, and Santa Claus is real too kiddies. Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.
The idiots in DC just keep showing themselves to be more stupid in all of this. Next up: The US bans China from having diesel engines.
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The US bans China from having diesel engines.
Ooo, don't tell Cummins [cummins.com]
ARM lobbying (Score:5, Insightful)
So ARM wants to limit RISC-V. Purely to stop the CCP, of course. No conflict of interest there.
Doritos! (Score:2)
Geopolitically Suicidal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Geopolitically Suicidal (Score:5, Interesting)
RISC-V will do to the CPU market what Linux did to the software market, only to a much greater extent. Expect RISC-V to take ARM market share quickly, as the adopters improve the silicon and implementations, and ARM starts getting seriously protectionist.
X86 and AMD will linger on, plenty of room for them to make a living.
'Specialty' CPUs and SOC chips more like Google's Tensor might migrate to future RISC-V designs, but RISC-V will scavenge the market from ARM for all but the biggest, like Snapdragon and Exnyos. Further impediments to Intel getting into the mobile SoC business, they have a very high potential competitor coming.
I really expect RISC-V to expand in the CPU market in the next 5 years, and dominate in 10. The open source model will lead to massive progress and improvement, and it will become a candidate for nearly every application. Watch. Linux was a toy for a little while, and only the cost of production will hold back RISC-V progress. I expect that foundries will become more competitive in the boutique market, especially near-state-of-the-art element sizes, and China is making money with less than the best now. This will not change. RISC-V will be produced at the best foundries soon enough.
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> RISC-V will do to the CPU market what Linux did to the software market,
Any person can get a Linux source dump and compile it. Do you think anyone can download a Verilog file and make a custom ASIC on the kitchen table?
As long as the tech to build the chips and actually make silicon is in the hands of extremely expensive machines the owners of those machines can do whatever they want. And this is not going to change.
Yes, you can use FPGA but if you think you can buy an FPGA with the same firepower as yo
Re: Geopolitically Suicidal (Score:2)
Sure. You going to have to have a foundry to do it. Or, we could get together. Perhaps foundry to run off a. Wafer for us, but it wouldn't be very cost-effective admittedly. But right now there are a whole bunch of outfits that have no business having chips made that are having these chips made. And the truth is that while you and I can compile a new Linux kernel without a lot of trouble, that's not where the business is. The business isn't being able to deploy a state of the art system with minimal if any
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Only the spec is open source. All the proprietary stuff that manufactures do to make it run fast is secret. It's not like Linux where improvements get published and become part of the open source core project.
That will be an issue for things like SoCs. With ARM if you need a GPU they have one you can licence, complete with drivers and support. With RISC-V you are on your own.
Give it up (Score:5, Insightful)
The US is acting like they can keep trade secrets like China with silk production hundreds of years ago. It is like the old story of the boy trying to fix a leak in a dike by sticking his finger in it.
The stink of desperation is strong (Score:4, Insightful)
RISK-V is open. Anybody can implement it, extend it and sell products based on it. Trying to "control" is is entirely futile. The US could try to control Linux with just about as much chance of success. There is also no doubt that China could have come up with something equivalent, but why should they? This way, they are just more compatible, can export products more easily and may just eventually move ahead. Because that is what protectionism actually does and why it is entirely stupid here: Against an opponent that has the capability, it just make that opponent evolve faster and, at the same time, makes the industry that gets "protected" stay in deep sleep and continue to move slowly. Protectionism is a sign of desperation and it makes things worse. Smart leaders do not do it.
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Trying to control it might be futile ; but its also just an instruction set, its not of any real value besides its commonality.
So make it uncommon! Sabotage Risk-V in the US and ideally EU market place, let China and the rest of the second world have at. The BEST thing that could happen is China's native technology stacks become disparate and incompatible with what the West is using.
It will make it much much harder for china to train people to work on build , and yes 'hack' stuff in the western market plac
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Naa, the EU is not as stupidly lead as the US. You are free to ruin your own economy as much as you like though. Some say that concerted efforts to that effect have already been underway for a decade or longer.
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I predict this comment will age as well as milk left in a hot car in July. LUL
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I am looking forward to revisiting your "prediction" in about 10 years or so. Always good to have some future laughs planned.
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That would have been nice to have over the last 20+ years.
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That's just stupid. All the gadgets already come from China. They'll probably have RISC-V CPUs in them anyway because the cat is already out of the bag.
Your proposal just means that Americans won't understand how the gadgets are made or how they work. *We* would be the ones who become atrophied, unable to design or develop technology we rely on.
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Indeed.
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Its not the gadgets; its the large scale high thruput data processing parts that matter. Most of the gadgets can be easily designed on top of a number of parts that are available domestically.
It is however the case experience and access to small cheap things is how most folks learn about developing and working on bigger iron. Its not about denying China technology, its about isolating them in their own silo. Its about making sure the people they have do not posses skills that transfer to American system
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You've got it backwards.
You're trying to put US in a silo.
Impedance mismatch! (Score:2)
"Last month, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party -- in an effort spearheaded by Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin -- recommended that an interagency government committee study potential risks of RISC-V".
How I would like to be there to see them try to understand what an instruction set is, how it can be implemented, what RISC-V is... and then ponder what its "potential risks" might be.
There will be a few exploded brains lying around.
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Open instruction set (Score:2)
I'm no expert on RISC-V but the literature states that is an "open instruction set architecture".
"the RISC-V ISA and extensions ratified by RISC-V International are royalty free and open base building blocks for anyone to build their own solutions and services on."
So you can build your own implementation of the instruction set and presumably have software compatibility with other hardware. It doesn't mean the implementations are open, they can be completely or partially proprietary. Here's a good explanatio
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I'm no expert on RISC-V but the literature states that is an "open instruction set architecture".
"the RISC-V ISA and extensions ratified by RISC-V International are royalty free and open base building blocks for anyone to build their own solutions and services on."
So you can build your own implementation of the instruction set and presumably have software compatibility with other hardware. It doesn't mean the implementations are open, they can be completely or partially proprietary.
All true. To be honest, I'm at a loss what restricting RISC-V might mean. The RISC-V ISA documentation horse has left the barn, trotted down the street, and is munching grass a few counties over. There's no getting that back. Congress could possibly restrict further publication but that would just mean any future development will take place outside the USA and that doesn't seem a win.
From the summary, I take it what the honorable member from Wisconsin wants is to keep US citizens from collaborating with TSM
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The instruction set standard alone isn't particularly valuable as you say. I'm thinking they want to restrict collaboration with China in developing sophisticated implementations of RISC-V. ARM already appears to see RISC-V as a competitive threat so there must be something to it. The West does not want to see China gaining a foothold in the high-end CPU space.
If that's the case it may be a little easier to police. Western companies would be restricted from collaborating on RISC-V chips.
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The instruction set standard alone isn't particularly valuable as you say. I'm thinking they want to restrict collaboration with China in developing sophisticated implementations of RISC-V.
No doubt that's the idea. I'm not quite sure what that would look like. Let's say I work at Xylinx and want to create a new FPGA with an embedded RISC-V core. I can talk with people at TSMC about all the gates and traces but we have to stop the meeting when we start talking about the RISC-V core?
ARM already appears to see RISC-V as a competitive threat so there must be something to it.
Forget China, I'm sure ARM sees RISC-V as a threat the same way Microsoft saw Linux as a threat. They absolutely need to take it seriously, hopefully by outengineering the dozens of companies trying to make high per
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Are you sure restrictions would apply for TMSC? It is Taiwan, they are even building a chip plant in the US.I think this initiative is targeted at the mainland.
Mainland China is investing quite a bit now in semiconductor manufacturing, "leads the world in terms of number of new fabs under construction".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Seems like it would be much easier to make RISC-V than CISC, and to tack on specialized arithmetic or neural accelerators where required. It could even be that enhancement mod
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Are you sure restrictions would apply for TMSC?
Depends who you talk to. I think we've put restrictions on TSMC because it's way too close to mainland China.
Seems like it would be much easier to make RISC-V than CISC, and to tack on specialized arithmetic or neural accelerators where required. It could even be that enhancement modules can be developed and licensed out as pluggable componentry.
No doubt, that's one of the RISC-V design goals, to make it easy to customize and extend but also to make very low-end, simple versions if you want. My understanding is ARM is much closer to a RISC architecture than something like x86. It certainly competes by being smaller, cheaper, and consuming less power than x86 so I can see why they'd be worried.
Wrong approch (Score:3)
The problems US is having with China aren't technological, they are political and economic. Trying to solve it entirely via technological restrictions, especially of open specifications is not only counterproductive and borderline stupid, it will probably end up in the toolkit of various abusers like the patent trolls, or the companies that have over the years tried to attack opensource.
And it will be wrapped in patriotism and matriotism to make it even harder to tackle politically.
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And it will be wrapped in patriotism and matriotism to make it even harder to tackle politically.
it's mostly about that, politicians being politicians. other sanctions will indeed have an effect (and are already starting to backfire) but this one will have no consequence whatsoever, except maybe a bit of ridicule. if they go through with this at all, that is, it's probably just about contributing to the noise.
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Disagree: it's not borderline stupid. It's full on intentionally ignorant.
It's like trying to stop the rain by dancing.
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I was being polite.
Why does RISC-V suck? (Score:2)
Why is it that, assuming both are on the same node, a RISC-V cpu underperforms ARM severely .. like, not even in same league dude. One came fourth in kindergarten checkers the other is Magnus Carlsen.
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Compare RISC-V to Cortex-A78, not much of a lead for ARM there. And RIOSC-V is nowhere near maximum potential.
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The bigger problem for ARM is RISC-V is already "good enough" for many applications and is seeing significant up take since it saves money on product costs. I have done product development with both ARM and RISC-V and the BOM cost savings using RISC-V are significant. Are consumers going to pay more for "ARM inside" when there is a cheaper identical product sitting next to it?
That genie is already out of the bottle anyway (Score:2)
This is not the way.
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decades? More like not yet even one decade. Your points are valid though.
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What do they think they're going to do? (Score:3)
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Obligatory (Score:2)
Obligatory: you wouldn't steal a computer architecture, would you? [youtube.com]
China is Growing Up (Score:2)
Finally, China steals something they're actually allowed to steal, and our knee-jerk reaction is the punish them for it. I guess we're just accustomed to that. And I'm ignoring anything ARM Holdings says on this one. I pretty sure RISC-V is going to eat ARM's lunch one day, and they can see it coming.
Risk-V (Score:2)
Risk-V is so scary. It's open you see. Nobody should be allowed to use this tool freely, much like a knife. Knives are scary and dangerous. Knives should be subject to export control.
My one question: does Steve Ballmer still own a cape? (Incredibles allusion, but, um, sorry...)
Arm Holdings (Score:4, Interesting)
Arm Holdings, a British company that sells competing chip technology, has also lobbied officials to consider restrictions on RISC-V
Well, there you go.
Arm has seen the writing on the wall, and their proprietary architecture
is likely already losing some business to RISC-V. And you know what?
They will lose more, maybe much more. So they are resorting to political
machinations to try to maintain their propritary business model.
Fuck you, Arm.
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That bell (Score:2)
Xenophobic protectionism never ends well (Score:2)