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Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

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Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#151

Post by retrocryptid »

krispyfi wrote: post #73
mschuster91 wrote: post #58

> This has long been a trade-off of American innovation philosophy: we can freely exercise our First Amendment rights to share ideas, creating a vibrant intellectual exchange, even at the risk of others benefiting from reading our textbooks, journals and patents. Sometimes, we have to re-evaluate our positions. We cannot risk supplying our enemies with stuff they can turn around and use as weapons against ourselves a…

Have you ever read "The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks? We won't win by allowing the enemy to make us more like them.

It worked pretty well for us in WWII.

Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#152

Post by retrocryptid »

lolinder wrote: post #70
ajross wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but there's no product. There's no RISC-V CPU targetted at laptop or datacenter users that Intel would be worried about, but there absolutely are from ARM vendors. So... how would hurting RISC-V, which helps ARM, be good for Intel? It's not. Pick a different boogeyman basically, Intel isn't the one here.

There was no competitive ARM CPU targeting laptop or datacenter users either, until Apple up and made one. For Intel to ignore RISC-V right now would be to completely neglect the lessons of Apple Silicon. They appear to have waited until there was an actual product taking their market share before taking ARM seriously. I expect them to learn from that and not wait for a product this time.

Lol. Fanboi.

Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#153

Post by jakobson14 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #13

China should stop stealing our IP and create their own technology wait no not like that

It's funny, because a similar story played out between britain and the US with machine tool technology.

The british were the first to go through the industrial revolution and had the best, most precise machine tool technology. They banned export of this technology to the USA. Well, turns out you can bootstrap precision, moving from less precise to more precise machine tools if you're careful manage your errors well.

Soon enough, the USA had caught up and then pulled ahead in machine tool technology.

Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#154

Post by CamperBob2 »

burnished wrote: post #139
germandiago wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not american but I would assume this is just mocking.

You would want that to be the case yeah. The search terms would be 'marco rubio' and 'young earther', I believe.

Not to mention, second in line to the Presidency: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-joh...

Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#155

Post by jakobson14 »

chaostheory wrote: post #84

Bunny’s stance would have been reasonable if someone like Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao was in power, but Xi is different. Not only has Xi blocked the West from accessing China’s domestic market, but Xi has essentially helped end globalism and started decoupling with his foolish wolf warrior diplomatic policy and the belligerent nine dash line. Let’s also not forget about Xi’s invasion plans for Taiwan ie we’re likely hea…

Blocked or not blocked from china's market, hindering US companies from developing and becoming leaders in emerging new technologies will not help the US stay ahead.

China wants to catch up, and they will with or without US help. The only question is whether the USA will work to remain competitive by mastering new domains, or whether it will sit back on it's laurels and the technology it's already mastered.

The development of cheap and ubiquitous RISC-V processors has major implications for the economics of putting software into devices. When modern military and civilian tech relies on doing that? This is one of the areas you need to be pushing into to stay competitive.

Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#156

Post by jakobson14 »

xtian wrote: post #148
chaostheory wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a new subject. For instance, both Google and Facebook are not allowed in China despite their past attempts to comply with mercurial and vague CCP laws. https://www.businessinsider.com/major-us-tech-companies-bloc... I’m sure there are more US companies and industries that are not allowed to compete in China’s domestic market. The GDPR is protectionist legislation for EU companies, but it doesn’t prevent US…

So how does Microsoft manage it? Bing and other Microsoft properties are accessible in China.

They cut a deal. Just like how apple partners with a chinese firm to store chinese users' data in china.

Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#157

Post by hakfoo »

derefr wrote: post #111
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively committing genocide, historically has been, and continues to be, justification for the initiation of a world war where all previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop them from doing this.) They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch vehicles and submarines, nobody is going to go to war with them over their own domestic crimes. A l…

Land war? Who said anything about a land war? This would be a two-pronged war: a war of orbital+information supremacy (probably, but we don't even know the full evolution of internal military doctrine in 2023); and an insurrectionist war. Specifically, the goal from the Western perspective wouldn't be to "fight China" as one coherent entity, but rather specifically to erase the CCP from existence. A decapitation, of…

> A decapitation, of a head from a body that isn't a very big fan of that head.

What's the argument behind this? Yes, there are questions about the quality of polling data you can extract from the Chinese public, but the polls that do exist seem to show broad and wholehearted support and trust in the state.

I can see why: they addressed the core 'are you better off than your father was at this phase in his life' question for the vast majority of their population.

There's a real chance this backfires: you didn't throw off the hated tyrant, you assassinated a respected symbol of progress and prestige.

Maybe China's relatively modest global ambitions come from a conscious attempt to avoid a direct replay of the Cold War. From an idealistic perspective, one obvious lesson was that you can't reliably export philosophy; Soviet satellite states and American-propped-up democracies both became money pits and fell apart. So why not stick to things like Belt and Road, which provide you economic opportunity and soft power on a budget?

Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#158

Post by ajross »

hakfoo wrote: post #149
ajross wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business advice that is tantamount to "Oh, you should just make a better product" is basically bad business advice. Of course they should, everyone should. But the problem is that if they tried, it (1) costs money and (2) leverages no existing advantages. These low-margin companies live and die on compatibility and integration. The reason you pick a STM32-whatever as your choice for your new product is generally at l…

I'm not sure that's such a case for STMicro. Microcontrollers are, all things considered, not that much about the ISA itself, especially when we've gotten to 32-bit controllers big enough to program in C or higher-level languages. People aren't reading the raw assembly and juggling registers themselves anymore. But they do care about the onboard peripherals, documentation, and tooling. The STM32 ecosystem is huge bec…

I can 100% guarantee to you that's not the case. Existing shipping products in this world are based on proprietary toolchains, HALs like CMSIS that are ARM-only, Eclipse-based IDEs that teams refuse to move away from, build tools wrapped around custom linker scripts for one architecture that no one understands anymore, ...

This isn't a FAANG office where everyone's an expert and people change tools weekly. Commercial firmware work for "boring" devices is extremely conservative, and there's a ton of money left to be made shipping junk that's merely "compatible".

Re: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

#160

Post by hakfoo »

ajross wrote: post #158
hakfoo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's such a case for STMicro. Microcontrollers are, all things considered, not that much about the ISA itself, especially when we've gotten to 32-bit controllers big enough to program in C or higher-level languages. People aren't reading the raw assembly and juggling registers themselves anymore. But they do care about the onboard peripherals, documentation, and tooling. The STM32 ecosystem is huge bec…

I can 100% guarantee to you that's not the case. Existing shipping products in this world are based on proprietary toolchains, HALs like CMSIS that are ARM-only, Eclipse-based IDEs that teams refuse to move away from, build tools wrapped around custom linker scripts for one architecture that no one understands anymore, ... This isn't a FAANG office where everyone's an expert and people change tools weekly. Commercial…

That audience is sort of immaterial to the argument.

If you have a firm that's committed to a frozen image of the platform on a specific date, they'll stick with existing products or modest riffs on it. The same premise is why we'll still see Z80 and 8051 derivatives until long past the heat death of the universe.

This is more about why a firm like STMicro doesn't need to freak out too much about RISC-V. There's no reason they 1) can't continue to sell ARM alongside RISC-V for the more change-averse audience and 2) leverage their established reputation in onboard-peripherals, toolchain, and documentation as their competitive edge.

Done right, this can be a real "commoditize your compliment" play: they can focus less effort on the boring "core CPU" functionality of their MCUs and divert it for the parts of the product they can offer a stronger case for.

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