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RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war

reuters.com

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Re: RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war

#71

Post by maven29 »

aiunboxed wrote: post #68

What is the incentive for big giants like Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia to adopt RISC-V? Isn't their moat their in-house chips? I guess it is more about companies which don't have their own proprietary chips or companies in developing nations.

Really, it's for anyone who's core competency isn't selling general-purpose compute, but will have to design their own ASICs anyway.

For example, when WD open-sourced their SweRV cores in 2019, they also committed to shipping 1 billion copies of the particular design. Beyond just the software ecosystem, they might be looking at incentivizing IP vendors to contribute to a rich ecosystem of interconnects, peripherals, and design/verification software.

Re: RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war

#72

Post by in_excess »

thayne wrote: post #42

I suspect (but have no concrete evidence) that the real motivation behind this is that one or more companies feel threatened by risc-v, and hope that they by hindering collaboration, they can hobble their competitors on both sides of the ocean.

Marco Rubio, the senator pushing for this, received 250k from SoftBank in 2022.

Re: RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war

#73

Post by phkahler »

aiunboxed wrote: post #68

What is the incentive for big giants like Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia to adopt RISC-V? Isn't their moat their in-house chips? I guess it is more about companies which don't have their own proprietary chips or companies in developing nations.

>> What is the incentive for big giants like Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia to adopt RISC-V? Isn't their moat their in-house chips?

Every chip company other than Intel and AMD licenses designs or ISA from ARM. Risc-V has no licensing fees if you design your own, and there are even free designs out there.

It's not feasible to create your own instruction set. You also have to build a whole bunch of software infrastructure for it and convince people to use it and port apps to it. Intel doesn't license x86. ARM costs money, and RISC-V is an open standard that was competently designed by some very smart people. It is also the 3rd most well supported ISA from a software point of view.

Re: RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war

#76

Post by numpad0 »

oefrha wrote: post #67
neilv wrote: post #13

> "require any American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC (People's Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology." How would that end up working? I've seen situations in which exports restrictions came up, and which resulted in design or manufacturing being restructured, so that more work was shifted to be done in the restricted country. Which also meant that more know-how…

What the hell does that even mean for open source? Need an export license to run a frigging GitHub project if it has anything to do with RISC-V at all? Does a compiler with a RISC-V target count? Projects with RISC-V builds?

Yes to all, technically. It won't matter usually, but technically. Weapons export controls are getting absurd that buying Chinese to get around is totally an option now.

Like, seen those silver tablet thing for screening COVID in visitors? They are ALL designed and built by Chinese companies using really good and completely unlocked Chinese thermal cameras, because, access to Western versions of such high technology could "pose threat" to the Western world and is therefore severely restricted.

And they ALL record every faces it's seen, which are often not GUI discoverable nor exportable but extractable by sshing into, because of course they do and they are.

And that is what export control schemes are doing.

Re: RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war

#77

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #50
galangalalgol wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the us government recently force krakenSDR to pull down their passive radar software under these laws? That would seem to violate precedent.

According to the following link: https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/open-source-passive-radar-ta... > There’s no indication that there’s been any legal action from the USA government – the team’s being proactive, as fas as we’re told.

[deleted]

Re: RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war

#78

Post by justinclift »

skybrian wrote: post #46

I’m wondering which technology they mean? It doesn’t seem to be in the article. Surely not RISC-V instruction formats? That’s just the API. It doesn’t seem like the hard part of making a chip?

From the article:

    Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House select committee on China,
    said in a statement to Reuters that the Commerce Department needs to "require any
    American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC
    (People's Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology."
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