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It also makes RISC-V foreign just as the author complains that ARM is foreign.
I think placing restrictions on Americans working with PRC on RISC-V related stuff is a pretty reasonable thing to do.
Wasn’t RISC-V developed in the US? And the first company to produce chips with this ISA, SiFive is US based too. Why would it make sense to ban it in the US? They literally invented it.
SiFive launched a chinese subsidiary (StarFive) in
2017/2018. And they just announced they were giving
designs for some of their high-end cores to Sophgo (a
company out of Beijing.) My guess is US administrators
want SiFive to apply for export licenses before they do
this again.
I pretty much agree w/ Bunnie on this one. I lived
through the Crypto(graphy) Wars of 90s and still have
my "Sink Clipper" poster around here somewhere. If US
companies are trying to sell products and services
based on technology they can't export, but foreign
countries can easily replicate, the only thing you're
doing is making them (US tech companies) operate at a
disadvantage.
If we were worried about foreign tech dominance, then
maybe we could do what foreign countries do:
a. Develop a national industrial policy.
b. Pay for kids to get EE degrees. (or hell, pay for
kids to get business or art degrees.)
c. Subsidize the chip manufacturing sector the same
way we subsidize farmers or petroleum marketers.
d. Force Samsung and TSMC (both foreign countries) to
form joint ventures with US firms where US
countries own at least 51% of the JV.
Claiming they can close the Pandora's Box of
semiconductor manufacturing knowledge this late in the
game makes them (US Lawmakers) look incompetent. If
they wanted to "save US chip manufacturing" they should
have done something in the 1970s when TI was building
manufacturing plants in Malaysia and Thailand.wait no not like that
The fact that RISC-V jumped to Switzerland after being funded by the US during its development makes me inclined to say screw RISC-V. It also makes RISC-V foreign just as the author complains that ARM is foreign. I think placing restrictions on Americans working with PRC on RISC-V related stuff is a pretty reasonable thing to do.
I see this as short sighted anti China fear mongering but China is now at a point where is can invotate itself with out the help of "western" tech.
Does anyone know what restrictions have actually been proposed? Media reporting on it is uselessly vague.
They are fairly broad and stipulate that US persons cannot transfer technology to any company on an entity list. iirc there was a clarification to the rule that also put a burden on US persons to confirm that they aren't working with a trading front or shell company for the listed entities, which makes any interaction potentially hazardous, because how are you even supposed to check for that?
Note that violations of these rules can "include up to 20 years of imprisonment and up to $1 million in fines per violation, or both" [2]. And the use of "US persons" language means that it's not just companies, it's individual developers too.
If you read the text of the rules, they restrict any kind of technology transfer to these companies. In the case of selling fabrication equipment, that's...fairly clear cut. Don't sell stuff to people on the list, and your deal was probably a few million dollars anyways so you can afford lawyers to research if you're dealing with a shell company.
But the concern is for RISC-V "technology transfer", what happens if you push to a git repository, and...someone from one of these entities pulls your commits? Are you now liable? What if you give a lecture on RISC-V, and someone from one of these entities was in attendance?
Or perhaps you're in charge of crafting an IP strategy for your SoC company. If you pick RISC-V, the ambiguous and changing rules around who you can license your products to is problematic; a client you have today could end up being banned tomorrow. Whereas if you license an ARM core, you don't have to worry about going to jail. It then becomes a no-brainer to just license the ARM core.
Basically, the concern is they will copy/paste the existing rules that are somewhat more tightly confined because they apply to atoms, but instead insert language referring to bits and ideas.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/13/2022-21...
[2] https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oee/penalties
Even more amazing is US lawmakers continuing to try & shoot the US in the foot.
RISC-V is now globally developed, that ship has sailed. Same for products based on it. The US can't prevent its 'proliferation'. Only reduce the degree to which US entities are part of, and profit from that.
Are US lawmakers that dumb? (ok I guess that's a rhetorical question).
Wasn’t RISC-V developed in the US? And the first company to produce chips with this ISA, SiFive is US based too. Why would it make sense to ban it in the US? They literally invented it.
This is basically ARM lobbying to hamper their challenger. There is no legitimate reason for it. (That doesn't mean we don't still need to fight it.)
r/TeslaInvestors and r/AMD_Stock are some of the worst. I can easily imagine some in the latter organizing to get RISC-V banned in the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is basically ARM lobbying to hamper their challenger. There is no legitimate reason for it. (That doesn't mean we don't still need to fight it.)
Something to look out for in recent years are cultist grassroot investors who organize on Reddit and Twitter to influence politicians to do something that is favorable to their stock and harass journalists and YouTubers who report critically and harm their stock. r/TeslaInvestors and r/AMD_Stock are some of the worst. I can easily imagine some in the latter organizing to get RISC-V banned in the US.
The loser from RISC-V is clearly ARM because it's not nearly as hard to produce a low-power processor with mid-level performance, which is the core of ARM's market but RISC-V allows the vendors to avoid paying for the ARM license. And unlike x86, most existing ARM software isn't distributed as third party binaries tied to a particular architecture and could easily be recompiled for something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is basically ARM lobbying to hamper their challenger. There is no legitimate reason for it. (That doesn't mean we don't still need to fight it.)
Something to look out for in recent years are cultist grassroot investors who organize on Reddit and Twitter to influence politicians to do something that is favorable to their stock and harass journalists and YouTubers who report critically and harm their stock. r/TeslaInvestors and r/AMD_Stock are some of the worst. I can easily imagine some in the latter organizing to get RISC-V banned in the US.