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Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

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Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#111

Post by lone_haxx0r »

HNcantBtrustd wrote: post #18

Whenever I hear the horrors of the tradewar in a positive light, I wonder if this is the Russian propagandists in action. How can war be good? Delighting in the suffering of everyone?

There is a legal/political artifact in this case: Intellectual property.

If IP didn't exist, then this wouldn't be good news, because we would have always had a competitive market in the first place, we wouldn't have proprietary ISAs.

This trade war just happens to interact with that artifact in a positive way: fostering competition in spite of IP.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#112

Post by [deleted] »

kllrnohj wrote: post #96
FullyFunctional wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software. There's tremendous inertia in apps which is what gave x86 an effective monopoly in the 90'es, even when superior options were available (hello Alpha). Today the situation is actually better and with RISC-V having the same memory model as Arm, porting from an Arm version is way easier (Neon code not withstanding) but it's obviously way less attractive than running running existing code.

> Today the situation is actually better and with RISC-V having the same memory model as Arm, porting from an Arm version is way easier (Neon code not withstanding) It's really not any different today than it was. The memory model being similar is kinda nice, but you still need to convince the world to compile for another arch. And you need to make a CPU good enough to justify the recompile and ongoing multi-arch mai…

[deleted]

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#113

Post by jsizzle »

addicted wrote: post #107

So there are basically 2 possibilities. It is possible for Huawei, and Chinese companies in general, to build a successful alternative without using American technology (for the purposes of this post, I'm defining successful as equivalent to their American tech using competitors). It's not possible. What the actions on Huawei have done, however, is ensure that if that possibility exists, very significant chunks of Ch…

It also shows how short sighted USA is with this. They’ve given China incentive to reduce their reliance on the US and give the US less leverage overall. China may set a damaging precedent here with regard to US power

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#114

Post by imtringued »

microcolonel wrote: post #73
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20

The problem is that while RISC-V may deliver an excellent open ISA, there is no equivalent open solution for the GPU/display controller side. As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. I don't think there's something that Huawei or other Chinese manufacturers could easily start with and extend. So I can see RISC-V being ideal for applications that are not user facing or…

Nothing about RISC-V would cause any more difficulty interfacing with GPUs. Any GPU you can license piecemeal right now, can also be connected to a RISC-V complex.

ARM isn't going to license their GPUs to a competitor.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#115

Post by mappu »

axaxs wrote: post #97
magicsmoke wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, what's to stop Huawei from just copying and incorporating whatever they need into their IC designs regardless of patents? I can imagine foreign foundaries refusing orders from Huawei to avoid manufacturing IP infringing designs, but are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents? As an aside to that, how do foundaries know whether their client designs infri…

>are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents? Realistically, no. The only two competitive, bleeding edge foundries are TSMC and Samsung.

SMIC are now rolling out 14nm - that's apparently competitive enough for people to still use Intel CPUs.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#116

Post by The_rationalist »

Aperocky wrote: post #86
mises wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real, the Chinese have been stealing technology right and left for years. Losses number between $225 and $600 billion per year [0]. One in five companies has had its technology stolen [1]. They will just steal the tech. Or maybe they'll decide it's easier to work with AMD (they're already doing it on the CPU side [2]). This is not popular to say, but it is accurate and my statements are sourced. Feel free to…

The methodology in the US study seem to suggest that Chinese are inable to do anything on their own and any technology that US company have that somehow China also got, is ALL counted as stolen. That's a very fun verdict

Especially since China is the number one scientific country in terms of number of published papers and e.g are the leaders in nuclear fission and AI.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#117

Post by microcolonel »

imtringued wrote: post #114
microcolonel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about RISC-V would cause any more difficulty interfacing with GPUs. Any GPU you can license piecemeal right now, can also be connected to a RISC-V complex.

ARM isn't going to license their GPUs to a competitor.

AMD just announced a major license of their GPU tech to Samsung. Nvidia, Qualcomm, and other vendors have complete designs with their own GPUs. Vivante and Imagination would surely be glad to license their tech to smaller players.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#118

Post by garmaine »

monocasa wrote: post #48
garmaine wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of work being done on RISC-V vector computing and GPU equivalents. E.g.: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-RI...

As someone who looked hard into it, RISC-V doesn't really make sense for a GPU shaders, IMO. You'd have to change so many things about how the ISA works that you wouldn't get a benefit to using a common ISA. Stuff like how shaders are batched and dispatched, textures accesses make sense to be their own instructions, you want a larger register file on the scalar side, the memory barrier semantics are much more complex…

Most of the GPU workloads these days are not graphics related. They are general compute vector machines. The RISC-V vector extension is based on Cray's ISA and meant to compete in this space.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#119

Post by madez »

gruez wrote: post #105
madez wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has a huge variety of different models. They are experts in market segmentation. They could do that. But they won't, and there are few who could do that. With RISC-V, it is reasonable to expect multiple vendors to provide CPUs. There is a very good case to expect non-backdoored chips.

>Intel has a huge variety of different models. They are experts in market segmentation. They could do that. But they won't, and there are few who could do that. That's true, but the way they do that is in a way that requires minimal changes. In terms of the management engine, that means not including AMT module (software) but keeping the rest of the ME (hardware). After all, it also does some essential things like po…

> Something without an management engine would certainly possible, but would be limited to niche products like the librem.

I don't share this forecast. I think many private customers would view a machine without the ME and it's capabilities as a plus for a product when the marketing is done right. Especially since most don't care for the capabilities.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#120

Post by nine_k »

magicsmoke wrote: post #44
jsgo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. This would be a impediment typically, but considering they're blackballed already, how beholden are they to patents? Block imports? Think that's being done already. Requiring US companies to not do business with them? That's being done already. At this point, they just have to ride out the US/China trade war and then when thin…

Actually, what's to stop Huawei from just copying and incorporating whatever they need into their IC designs regardless of patents? I can imagine foreign foundaries refusing orders from Huawei to avoid manufacturing IP infringing designs, but are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents? As an aside to that, how do foundaries know whether their client designs infri…

There is no easy way to check for IP infringement here. When the key idea of a design may be 100% lifted illicitly, the schematics may be somehow different, and the mask layout, incomprehensibly different.
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