71–80 of 129 posts
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Arm China majority shareholders announce the company’s corporate governance issue has been resolved https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/04/arm-china-majority-...
Yes, that resolution has occurred in favor of the CCP. ARM Ltd folded. The person who controls the corporate seals is a CCP apparatchik.
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If you're manufacturing chips under sanctions your most difficult finds are going to be the manufacturing equipment, expertise, and raw materials to produce the chips. It's not going to be an ISA - there have been a litany of "open" ISAs and well-documented industry standard ones you're likely going to do unlicensed copies of. Secondary challenge here, going beyond the ISA, are pre-defined blocks of functionality alr…
You want to have lots of software for your computer. Like Linux, Chromium, compilers, JIT, etc. It reduces the number of options.
Access to high purity quartz is the real bottle neck. You can have your own fabs and designs.. but if America and Russia refuse to sell you some Quartz.. you are out of luck! https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/hi... .
Isn't the clock generator a discrete component? Do modern CPUs and GPUs have integrated clocks?
https://www.waferworld.com/post/9-things-you-might-not-have-...
Using RISC-V doesn't let you bypass chip shortages... Do they actually understand what they're talking about?
Any fab is allowed to produce a RISC-V CPU. You will also have far more core designs that can work across different fabrication possess.
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If you're manufacturing chips under sanctions your most difficult finds are going to be the manufacturing equipment, expertise, and raw materials to produce the chips. It's not going to be an ISA - there have been a litany of "open" ISAs and well-documented industry standard ones you're likely going to do unlicensed copies of. Secondary challenge here, going beyond the ISA, are pre-defined blocks of functionality alr…
You want to have lots of software for your computer. Like Linux, Chromium, compilers, JIT, etc. It reduces the number of options.
The single-purpose nature of ASICs and hardware blocks is what makes them fast and power-efficient.
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There are server specs but embedded was the initial priority. I don't think there's been a lot of attention paid to desktop which isn't a super interesting area in general although it could of course piggyback on server work from a spec perspective if anyone were actually interested in giving it a go.
Without a company like Apple to put in the resources and engineering effort for something like Rosetta, there's really going to be next to no demand for a RISC-V based desktop computer outside of specialized development and maybe competing with ARM-based Chromebook-likes. Desktop systems are absolutely beholden to their platform and architecture because that's what determines which apps you can run. Any serious use o…
One thing that RISC-V enables is open source hardware CPUs. There are quite a few people who're upset by stuff like the Intel Management Engine IME making them distrust their personal computer.
These folks don't really have any options that fit their criteria right now.
Some RISC-V CPU could fit in there.
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There are server specs but embedded was the initial priority. I don't think there's been a lot of attention paid to desktop which isn't a super interesting area in general although it could of course piggyback on server work from a spec perspective if anyone were actually interested in giving it a go.
What's the difference between desktop and embedded? I reverse-engineered some medical device. It houses tiny CPU and 3" touch screen. Inside it runs Linux with X Window, Chromium, Electron and software written with JS. It's definitely embedded device, it's tiny, works from accumulator, hand-held. But its software stack is not any different from desktop.
But these days, you have advanced 600MHz microcontrollers with simple GPUs, and full-featured CPUs which get used as an embedded platform. You can even build a Linux kernel for no-MMU platforms.
It's a fuzzy line.
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There are server specs but embedded was the initial priority. I don't think there's been a lot of attention paid to desktop which isn't a super interesting area in general although it could of course piggyback on server work from a spec perspective if anyone were actually interested in giving it a go.
Without a company like Apple to put in the resources and engineering effort for something like Rosetta, there's really going to be next to no demand for a RISC-V based desktop computer outside of specialized development and maybe competing with ARM-based Chromebook-likes. Desktop systems are absolutely beholden to their platform and architecture because that's what determines which apps you can run. Any serious use o…
But over ten or fifteen years? Very possibly. And if not porting apps directly to RISC-V, then porting them to WASM and letting browser vendors optimize WASM performance on RISC-V.
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I don’t know if sanctions are the reason, but moving away from foreign-controlled IP is certainly a thing. Chinese companies make STM32 clones (even fixing the errata in the original): https://hackaday.com/2020/10/22/stm32-clones-the-good-the-ba...
I think it's more about a potential future usage of ARM in a sanctions package. Somewhat similar to how Hauwai was was hit with a list of narrow prohibitions like access to the android store. Having an openly implementable ISA is just one less thing to worry about
The two desires are definitely at odds with each other. Like the RISC-V foundation moved to Switzerland to avoid the possibility in 2019. So the foundation is definitely trying to keep things more open.
At the end of the day it's just ISA and not a micro-architecture design or set of cell libraries and fab processes. So it's not a complete bypass of all possible sanctions. ARM for instance does provide designs and not just an ISA.
The main problem is that a chip made in a sanctioned country with RISC-V can still would have value outside the sanctioned entity unlike some organically developed or a chip made without legally licensing some-other ISA. So sanctioned entity could easily make the chips and then make them look like they are made elsewhere or by someone else and still have something to sell the wider world.