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It’s all very well, stopping Intel or Nvidia, selling their chips to China, or stopping foundries making chips made on particular process nodes to China, or to stop equipment companies selling defined equipment types to China, because there are not so many such companies and they all have managements, or come under governments, which are friendly to the US.
It is certainly possible to stop a company under the control of the US sanctions mechanism from assisting a Chinese company in designing a chip using a RISC-V core but, when thousands of design houses and individual designers across the world have access to RISC-V designs, how do you monitor the transfer of these designs to China? Or how do you stop a private individual helping in the design of a Chinese RISC-V SoC?
How, indeed, do you know if someone is helping China design a RISC-V SoC or passing it RISC-V IP? You’ve got to know it’s happening to be able to stop it, and it seems impossible for any government to control something which is used by thousands of people across the world, which has 3,000 subscribing members, which shipped ten billion units last year and which does not require any physical form of transportation to be transferred to China.
It would be interesting to know how the huffers and puffers intend to stop China getting access to RISC-V IP and to control those who use it.
This is not merely stupid but probably illegal.
Designs, data and code all come under the category of “human speech.”
The US government is prohibited from trying to control the speech of its own citizens by the first amendment. How likely is it that it will be able to control the speech of citizens in another country?
The idea is not merely unenforceable, it’s ludicrous.
This is an interesting game of logic:
US politicians can’t control RISC-V, but they think they can control big business. However, Google, Qualcomm, Broadcom et al are very wealthy companies,
– who know that RISC-V has some advantages (PPA).
– They also know that China is a huge producer of tech, and a huge customer of their products. And
– they know that China is 20% of the world’s tech market.
So it’s big businesses vs. politicians (who, in the US, need bankrolling)…
China – and other BRICS nations – aren’t going to be deflected from RISC-V. And Europe is interested in tech sovereignty too : so the market for “American!” Instruction Sets starts to diminish : American companies need RISC-V. The US economy needs RISC-V too.
Who is doing this huffing and puffing? Please be specific. What do they hope to accomplish? I’m sure there is a better approach than to deny the commoditization of ISAs. Seems this only hurts industry and innovation and to what end? If US officials want to give US companies a leg up, help us solve the real challenges of an educated workforce and disruptive access to highest technology manufacturing here in the US. Let’s educate the huffera and puffers rather than just point out how clueless they are.
Does it matter if a country suppresses a company?
Reminds me of the investigation of Phil Zimmermann for exporting munitions without a license (PGP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_investigation
Why would China even want it? The appeal of RISC-V over ARM is lower cost. Free IP.
China is already the world’s cheapest producer. They don’t need free IP.
This is a misunderstanding. RISC-V is an open source ISA standard along with other associated computing standards.
This is not a free implementation. There are some free implementations, from universities like Berkeley or Bologna/ETH Zurich (Pulp), or from groups such as OpenHW, but most implementations are from commercial suppliers like SiFive and ANDES. And these are not free.
And Chinese commercial suppliers like AliBaba offer cores that are not free.
The main appeal of starting your processor design with RISC-V standards is the access you gain to SW, eg compilers, libraries, stacks, which while still nascent, are moving rapidly to be a good starting point.
And then you can add your own secret sauce in proprietary ISA extensions.
It is easier to prevent pirating of movies in China … perhaps explaining it that way will help the huffers and puffers?
Pirating of movies happen everywhere. There may be less Western movies pirated in China than many other countries, e.g. India, mainly because the majority of Chinese are not conversant in English.
China is an existential threat to every democratic nation on Earth. We need to choke them off from getting any more tech assists from westerners. If the Swiss don’t agree, then punitive measures are warranted.
The US needs to, as Khan Noonan Sighn said, “explain it to them”.
Somehow I don’t think the US is going to start bombing Switzerland!
RISC-V has important contributions from China, Russia (implementation sellers), India, Japan, UK, Italy, Germany, as well as US.
As explained the horse has left the barn,and in this domain, hard to divide the world into the “west” and the “rest”.
Better for the west to concentrate its attention on the physical side- eg implementations, tools and machines.
But this is only a delaying tactic and encourages Chinese autarky.
Well they do have a bit of a history of bombing Switzerland.
Quite a few times.
The THREAT is the UNITED STATES
The United States Empire OFFICIALLY maintains the largest active troop presence abroad of any country in the world, with
* over 170,000 active duty military personnel stationed overseas
*at nearly 800 military bases in
*more than 70 countries and territories around the
Globe
*including around 90,000 troops deployed across more than 200 bases in East and South-East Asia including Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Australia, Singapore , the Philippines , and now Taiwan….Countries SURROUNDING China:
It routinely carries out military exercises in the region.
In addition the US has troops stationed in countries where it is not always welcomed, like Cuba, Syria , Sufan, Yemen , Iraq, Niger, and in South Korea and Okinawa
This US Congress huffing and puffing about RISC-V and China shows misunderstandings about IP and RISC-V in particular. RISC-V is an open-source ISA and associated computing standards controlled by an international group out of Switzerland and published publicly. This includes software – compilers, tools and other SW.
Implementations of processors and systems using RISiC-V can be controlled for export to China as you point out. But china has several indigenous implementations already and more to come. It also participates in RISC-V standards and sw development.
So this horse left the barn many years ago.
The use of RISC-V may give a leg up to Chinese developers but it is their proprietary ISA extensions and SW that will differentiate Chinese processors and systems. ‘Twas ever thus.
I’ve been looking at getting RISC-V MCUs from GigaDevice to explore as alternatives to ARM. It is one of the few companies offering hardware, and is Chinese…
The Espressif ESP32-C3 has far better software support than the GigaDevice. It’s under a dollar and guess what, they’re Chinese as well 🙂 Well worth getting one of the little $5 test boards if you want to try it out.
Most of the other RISC-V chips, usually from Western startups, seem to have mid-range performance at high-end prices.
There are some RISC-V chips buried inside a lot of nVidia devices, but they are to do hard-programmed tasks and you only see the ARM or GPU programming interfaces.