China To Publish Policy To Boost RISC-V Chip Use Nationwide (reuters.com) 19
AmiMoJo writes: China plans to issue guidance to encourage the use of open-source RISC-V chips nationwide for the first time, Reuters reports, citing two sources briefed on the matter, as Beijing accelerates efforts to curb the country's dependence on Western-owned technology.
The policy guidance on boosting the use of RISC-V chips could be released as soon as this month, although the final date could change, the sources said. It is being drafted jointly by eight government bodies, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the China National Intellectual Property Administration, they added.
The policy guidance on boosting the use of RISC-V chips could be released as soon as this month, although the final date could change, the sources said. It is being drafted jointly by eight government bodies, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the China National Intellectual Property Administration, they added.
Intel (Score:2)
And so we see that the protectionist policies that ban China from acquiring decent technology really just serves to seal Intel's fate. It's also a market Arm would like to be in, but they're still competitive, so stand a chance of innovating out of trouble.
Intel was failing anyway, so this wasn't the cause of it, but missing out on that particular market sure won't make it easy for them to recover. Meanwhile, Chinese foundries will be minting chinese versions of Risc-V and chinese buyers will be buying the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The protectionist policies, in my opinion, had little to do with China's push for RISC-V. The reason I think that is because China has, at least since Xi (I-AM-not-a-petty-little-dictator) Xinping, been working to wean itself off Western and especially U.S. controlled technology. Also, that leech, the CCP, needs something they can promote to the Chinese to claim they aren't just a bunch of worthless parasites.
All the protectionist policies in the U.S. do is show that la Presidenta understands nothing about
Re: (Score:2)
>> from acquiring decent technology
Its just the most cutting-edge technology. They can still get decent stuff.
Meanwhile, Intel is heavily involved in RISC-V;
https://www.intel.com/content/... [intel.com]
RISC-V performance (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
>> RISC-V and its successors as an architecture perform better than x86 and ARM
Where are you seeing that? The ARM architecture is based on RISC principles.
Re: (Score:2)
Thats like saying Windows and Mac are also based on the same principles (GUI based OS).
Re: (Score:2)
No, it isn't like that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing says "State of the art" than 1980s chip design!
I really think RISC-V is overblown. An open CPU standard is a good thing, but using an ABI that's only efficient using one specific CPU architecture that was relevant 40 years ago solely because 100,000 transistors was considered a lot is... weird.
Apple's done sterling work making ARM work for non-embedded applications, but very little of that has anything to do with RISC.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, although I think raw computational performance x86, or rather AMD64, will continue to win out for now. The basic concept of taking an intermediate bytecode like AMD64 and converting that to extensive amounts of microcode seems to be pretty unbeatable for a lot of tasks. Not so much on energy performance, but even there it's not terrible.
I'm sure RISC-V will come to rival ARM for both though. With big backers and huge amounts of R&D pumped into it, can ARM and its partners really compete? History
Re: (Score:2)
This depends entirely on the implementation. RISC-V is an ISA.
Some boards are on par, most are simple, slow, and cheap.
Explaining Computers has some great videos comparing performance of various boards. Most are slower than a Pi.
I have several RISC-V boards but none of the expensive ones. Raxxa (sp?) has a fast dev board now for about $500. Mine are like $79.
Re: (Score:2)
RISC-V is probably going to overtake ARM and MIPS for low-end systems. A lot of embedded stuff could easily switch to RISC-V. Being royalty-free makes it attractive compared to ARM, and it's a bit cleaner than (also royalty-free) MIPS.
However at the high end, I think that's just wishful thinking. It's up against OpenPOWER and SPARCv9, which are both similarly royalty-free, and AArch64 which is a better architecture for a superscalar multi-issue design.
Dealing with SPARC first, there are implementations o
Re: (Score:2)
How do other architectures compare, eg Alpha, HPPA, IA64, Elbrus etc?
Re: (Score:2)
Briefly, Alpha and HP-PA are more cases of "you'd do it differently in hindsight" like MIPS and SPARC.
Elbrus is conceptually similar to the Transmeta Crusoe - it's a 512-bit VLIW architecture that uses binary translation to run x86 code. It doesn't seem to be getting great clock speeds, being stuck around 1.5GHz for the available parts. I think they're compromising on everything in order to maintain x86 compatibility. They lack the resources to make a competitive conventional x86 clone, so they're taking
Re: RISC-V performance (Score:1)
Dogfooding (Score:2)
This is good.
Having wide usage will promote more rapid development of capabilities.
An open source ISA is inevitable. It should be noted that some implementations have undocumented instructions that are starting to be used for license management and who knows what else so it's only a necessary precondition, not a panacea.
But Apple infamously has undocumented hardware backdoors too, so it's hardly unique.
A trustworthy OEM can use a trustworthy fab and create a trusted platform. In a free market.
Re: (Score:2)
If anything thi