On Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 2:32 PM Alvin Starr via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
It is true that ARM's ownership has allowed the US government to make things very difficult for Huawei. No wonder China likes RISC-V.
I would be willing to bet the various law makers are taking advice from Arm, Intel and AMD.
Think back to the days of proprietary Operating Systems. The main vendors were all going on about the evils of open source linux.
I think there's something very different at play here. While I'm sure existing chipmakers are whispering in Congress' ear, they don't have any selling to do. Since the US has already put export controls on advanced chipmaking technology and equipment in China, RISC-V can be trivially advanced as a path to circumvent such controls. It's no secret that the HQ of the RISC-V consortium was moved from the US to Switzerland explicitly to inhibit any one country (or bloc of countries) from inhibiting its progress. As you said, being open source hardware design it's available to all. That applies to China but also other countries under tech embargoes, as well as emerging economies like India that would also like to play in this field. The US and its allies can easily see chip-design superiority as a national security issue, and indeed they might prohibit their own nationals from participating and especially contributing IP. But they can't stop other countries from contributing, and it will be interesting to see if China -- with all its tech universities and foreign-college graduates -- is as able to fill that vacuum, along with other countries disliking Western controls. It is notable that, given that RISC-V tech is distributed under an Apache-like license, even the US&allies chipmakers are able to take any existing RISC-V tech and incorporate it into their own proprietary components. So they could build upon any Chinese-contributed innovation without having to give back. You don't need to even acknowledge the use of RISC-V in your own tech unless you want their logo. But this is only one part of the puzzle. The RISC-V consortium, like ARM, does not make chips but only chip designs. Once a spec is out you still need a Qualcomm able to turn it into silicon. Most advanced chipmaking hardware is also embargoed to China by the US, Taiwan, Japan, the Netherlands and others, so even if a sufficiently-advanced RISC-V design is created it will still be a challenge for an embargoed country to produce them. And China has had only limited success in making advanced chips for, say, post-embargo Huawei phones. The deep global-geopolitics component of this issue renders it far different IMO from Microsoft's anti-Linux campaigns, That was purely commercially driven. Back then open source wasn't well-known, and you could still spread FUD about it. We're decades past that now, and many of FOSS' old worst enemies are at best friends and at worst respectful competitors. Open source as a term is (generally) well understood and has spread to open source hardware, open source intelligence, and of course hardware. The players are different and the messages are different. Nobody is claiming anymore that open source produces inferior products; indeed, the proposed actions against RISC-V imply that its development model is seen as capable of producing something sufficiently advanced to pose an international security threat. - Evan