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Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

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Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#91

Post by detaro »

wmf wrote: post #42
AlexeyBrin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Linux distro probably, at least initially.

Does Huawei sell Linux laptops today? Why not? Why would that change? If they don't think x86/Linux or ARM/Linux laptops are a good idea, why would RISC-V/Linux laptops be a good idea? People love to come up with fantasies and try to work backwards from them, but sometimes you really can't get there from here.

> If they don't think x86/Linux or ARM/Linux laptops are a good idea

They didn't until now, but the US government just told them commercial OSes with a connection to the US can not be trusted, so they might very well be rethinking that.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#93

Post by detaro »

gok wrote: post #92

By moving away from ARM, mostly designed in the UK and with Japanese owners? Sounds like they're really just seeking general independence.

The ARM that is following US sanctions against Huawei due to its large presence in the US and reliance on what it says is "U.S.-origin technology"?

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#94

Post by panpanna »

ohyes wrote: post #85
Petrova wrote: post #84

Imagine the irony if Huawei turns into an open source company that is the best option for user privacy. Just by going with RISC-V they eliminate the issues with the Intel management engine. I'm curious what Huawei will do next.

That seems... unlikely.

Does it? Their first arm doc was extremely open.

It is often used by academics for researching really low level stuff.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#95

Post by joking »

zsrxx wrote: post #49
ksec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, That is because GPU scales very well with Transistor count, throw in more transistor and memory bandwidth and you are good. On the CPU you could have doubled the transistor budget and get marginal improvement in IPC.

Why can't a GPU power a computer?

You can calculate the value of each screen pixel without knowing the value of the others. To calculate the n value of a fibonnaci sequence you have to calculate the n-1 and n-2 values first, so it doesn't matter how many cores do you have. Gpus are for the former and CPUs for the latest.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#96

Post by kllrnohj »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #35
DoreenMichele wrote: post #28

More like "Huawei seeks to survive in the future in spite of the US squeezing them. They want to believe these other chips will let them do that." I don't understand the tech well enough to know how much of a fairy tale or hope and a prayer strategy this is. But calling it "seeks independence" is some incredibly positive spin which makes me suspicious of the claims. If these other chips are so good, wouldn't you go a…

Software. There's tremendous inertia in apps which is what gave x86 an effective monopoly in the 90'es, even when superior options were available (hello Alpha). Today the situation is actually better and with RISC-V having the same memory model as Arm, porting from an Arm version is way easier (Neon code not withstanding) but it's obviously way less attractive than running running existing code.

> Today the situation is actually better and with RISC-V having the same memory model as Arm, porting from an Arm version is way easier (Neon code not withstanding)

It's really not any different today than it was. The memory model being similar is kinda nice, but you still need to convince the world to compile for another arch. And you need to make a CPU good enough to justify the recompile and ongoing multi-arch maintenance.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#97

Post by axaxs »

magicsmoke wrote: post #44
jsgo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. This would be a impediment typically, but considering they're blackballed already, how beholden are they to patents? Block imports? Think that's being done already. Requiring US companies to not do business with them? That's being done already. At this point, they just have to ride out the US/China trade war and then when thin…

Actually, what's to stop Huawei from just copying and incorporating whatever they need into their IC designs regardless of patents? I can imagine foreign foundaries refusing orders from Huawei to avoid manufacturing IP infringing designs, but are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents? As an aside to that, how do foundaries know whether their client designs infri…

>are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents?

Realistically, no. The only two competitive, bleeding edge foundries are TSMC and Samsung.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#98

Post by Gibbon1 »

gumby wrote: post #77

What do they expect. The US tariff wall and embargo is essentially a subsidy that encourages local development. Without it it’s cheaper to continue to depend on US controlled designs. Essentially low tariffs make it hard for local industries to get themselves above the price floor. These parts aren’t much to get excited abOUT today but they’ve finally given China a reason to subsidize local efforts, resulting in the…

Few days ago someone posted a paper from 2002 talking about that with a quote from a 19th century US pol bitching about the British lowering tariffs in order to kick the ladder away.

digging

http://www.personal.ceu.hu/corliss/CDST_Course_Site/Readings...

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#99

Post by tenebrisalietum »

zsrxx wrote: post #49
ksec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, That is because GPU scales very well with Transistor count, throw in more transistor and memory bandwidth and you are good. On the CPU you could have doubled the transistor budget and get marginal improvement in IPC.

Why can't a GPU power a computer?

I'm not an expert and might be horribly wrong and welcome edification, but I believe you don't want your GPU powering your computer because

- GPUs don't handle I/O other than writing to video RAM.

- GPUs don't handle interrupts.

- GPUs don't handle branching well.

For the first two, a lot of infrastructure that is part of the chipset and platform would have to be extended to each compute unit of the GPU.

Imagine a database on a GPU. It's not like 1.5K-2k+ cores that are super good at math can read and write your disk or disk array at once.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#100

Post by jdnenej »

panpanna wrote: post #94
ohyes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems... unlikely.

Does it? Their first arm doc was extremely open. It is often used by academics for researching really low level stuff.

Their history with android is very poor. Their phones are next to impossible to physically open and they offer no way to unlock the bootloader but there are individuals who will charge you a fee to have the bootloader unlocked using their exploits.
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