RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by sangnoir » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 6:05 AM UTC

serf wrote: post #27

mvncleaninst wrote: post #14

> "I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software - whether in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI - and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed," Warner said in a statement to Reuters. This is clearly an attack on open source. Seems incredibly odd that they use the word "export" to refer to information (that is to say: speech) I really…

the quote sounds like it came from someone who didn't really fully grasp the phrase and the implications of what 'export control' might look like in reference to open-source. it's rich too listening to a senator talking as if the concept of open-source blindsided them given that the attention of Washington has been the very thing the various OSS groups having been working towards since forever.

> the quote sounds like it came from someone who didn't really fully grasp the phrase and the implications of what 'export control' might look like in reference to open-source.

Or didn't study recent history., the export control on strong encryption meant that American contributors would follow the letter of the law, and others outside of the US - eg Canadians for BouncyCastle[1] - would freely provide the missing illegal-to-export functionality to the rest of the world.

1. If memory serves, an American cryptographer once crossed into Canada to perform a 'forbidden commit'. The functionality technically wasn't an export of the US

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

#82

Post by aiunboxed » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 6:09 AM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #73

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…

Understood now it makes sense.

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

#83

Post by yafbum » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 6:20 AM UTC

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…

> more work was shifted to be done in the restricted country

Yes and it cost them more overall. People who design sanctions know well that they provide a powerful incentive to the development of indigenous alternatives in the target country. The calculus is that on balance, it is more desirable to force the target country to waste their resources on catching up (or on circumventing sanctions). The point is to make things more expensive.

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

#84

Post by neilv » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 7:12 AM UTC

yafbum wrote: post #83

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…

> more work was shifted to be done in the restricted country Yes and it cost them more overall. People who design sanctions know well that they provide a powerful incentive to the development of indigenous alternatives in the target country. The calculus is that on balance, it is more desirable to force the target country to waste their resources on catching up (or on circumventing sanctions). The point is to make th…

In practice, how much is it this calculus, and how much is it lobbyists for companies with fairly short-term commercial goals?

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

#85

Post by tritiy » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 7:18 AM UTC

"The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips."

In other words

"We should be the best .. they should not be allowed to be the best!"

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

#86

Post by sneak » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 7:38 AM UTC

promptdaddy wrote: post #56

throw9away6 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but quantity has always been chinas strength. Where they have historically struggled is quality. If they can bring the quality up to acceptable levels then those numbers would be truly impressive. That’s what they are striving for

Quality of what compared to who? Tiktok is winning.

As is the iPhone. Chinese manufacturing is unparalleled.

Comac is also quite instructive.

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

#87

Post by somsak2 » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 7:42 AM UTC

quantum_state wrote: post #30

Once the guys learn general relativity is used by GPS, they may just want to ban that … neither the US nor the world can afford this type of stupidity …

GPS is US government invented, owned, and operated. Reagan made it free for use by anyone.

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

#88

Post by omnimus » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 7:44 AM UTC

miohtama wrote: post #43

whatever1 wrote: post #38

I can see both of the sides of the argument. It seems that we use US funding to help everyone circumvent ARM and x86. The problem is that US enemies are also recipients of the US technology contributions. But what is the alternative? Stop publishing everything ?

Exactly. You make everything illegal or “regulated” (practically banned). The EU is already leading the way and has touched machine learning, end-to-end capable encryption and software distribution in various of its regulation directives. - Communications (every chat software must come with spyware installed) - AI (machine learning is too scary and authors say it will kill mankind, worse than a climate change) - RISC…

I just will say regulation doesnt equal ban. And that i am pretty sure EU didnt ban open source, RISC-V, encryption or software distribution. Some EU member states politicians have stupid ideas about communications/encryption so they push proposals but these are also often corporate lobby to gain more control over the networks. And afaik nothing has passed into actual law.

If anything EU has been generaly aiming their regulations at the american big tech which many see as vultures feeding on users and most importantly avoiding taxes.

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

#89

Post by thrtythreeforty » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 7:52 AM UTC

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?

If you set aside the absurdity of applying it to RISC-V for a second, yes, that is exactly what export control means. Any such regulated technology can't be exported (for a very well defined and strict definition of "exported"). Posting it on GitHub definitely counts as an export controls violation.

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

#90

Post by thrtythreeforty » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 7:56 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #7

When I was working in China one of the most common readings of Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem was to take the Trisolarans as a stand-in for the US, and it doesn't seem too far off the mark with proposals like this. Trying to intefere with the development of open source hardware isn't just regulating products any more, that's just throwing a wrench into the scientific process.

This is the kind of perspective I don't hear from within the US. How far does the metaphor go? Is it just the meddling, superiority complex, and halting of technological advance? Or do other Trisolaran traits such as inability to lie also have an analogue?

(I kind of doubt it goes too deep. Liu is great at concepts but the worldbuilding was not super in depth.)