"RISC-V technology emerges as battleground in US-China tech war"
<https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-china-tech-war-risc-v-chip-technology-emerges-new-battleground-2023-10-06/> Grrr. Some US lawmakers want to restrict US companies from working on RISC-V. They are worried it will benefit China (of course it will, and the rest of us too). 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.
On 2023-10-31 13:28, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
Grrr.
Some US lawmakers want to restrict US companies from working on RISC-V. They are worried it will benefit China (of course it will, and the rest of us too).
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. -- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||
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
On Thu, Nov 02, 2023 at 07:00:34AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
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.
Of course China has 1.5 billion people. A decent number of them are well educated and of course quite a lot of them are very smart. I don't think such export limitations are going to buy you that many years of delay before they are doing it all by themselves. Meanwhile any retaliazion from China is likely to be much more effective I would think. The rest of the world needs China's production more than they need us I would think. The US has a tendancy to make polices based on an invalid assumption that no one else could replicate what they have done from scratch. -- Len Sorensen
On Thu, Nov 2, 2023 at 8:12 AM Lennart Sorensen < lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote: Of course China has 1.5 billion people. Actually, not of course. It's 1.28 and shrinking, being officially bypassed this year by India as the world's most populous country. Credible research suggests that under average models it will shrink to under 750M by 2100. And that's based on official figures; some demographers don't trust those figures, and say it's much worse -- that India actually surpassed China as early as 2014. The one-child policy is long-gone, but nobody is having kids and nobody's moving there.
A decent number of them are well educated and of course quite a lot of them are very smart.
Indeed, enough of them travel abroad to study that countries are loathe to put restrictions on enrolment because universities have come to depend on their tuition income, at rates far higher than locals pay. But priorities and focus seem to be changing. I've had the fortune to go to China a number of times; in the end, I'd concluded that the risk to my employer was not worth the benefits of being there, given the partnership deals offered by the government agencies. My last trip was to speak at a FOSS conference in Shanghai. At the end of the session, the Q&A focused not on Linux or code or jobs, but obsessed with why my organization was perceived to treat Taiwan as a country. It was devastating and depressing, not a single tech question. Everything there (that I could see) was getting politicized, far more than I'd encountered elsewhere. And, as you know, most Western media is banned there, so we have access to their goings-on -- at least what people are able to say -- but not the opposite. An ICANN conference I attended in Beijing attracted double the normal volume of registrations -- not because locals are more interested in the DNS, but because attendees got access to uncensored wifi. I don't think such export limitations are going to buy you that many years
of delay before they are doing it all by themselves.
The jury is out, and not all measures have been implemented. IE, there are no restrictions yet on RISC-V and it may not happen. Meanwhile any retaliazion from China is likely to be much more effective I
would think.
It's already started. The fact you haven't heard about it much may speak to its effectiveness. China has targeted exports of specialty metals used in manufacturing of chips, batteries etc. but companies are so far having little trouble finding other sources (including Canada, which is ramping up production). The rest of the world needs China's production more than they need us I
would think.
Of course limiting trade hurts all parties, but the above assertion is a mistake IMO. Yes, the world has come to see China as its manufacturing plant, but the country also needs to import core necessities such as energy, food and fertilizer, without which it would have widespread famine. And given China's population decline, labour costs there are now higher than in neighbours such as Vietnam. One of the last holdouts, Apple, is moving significant production from China to India. - Evan
On Thu, Nov 02, 2023 at 01:29:43PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
On Thu, Nov 2, 2023 at 8:12 AM Lennart Sorensen < lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
Of course China has 1.5 billion people.
Actually, not of course. It's 1.28 and shrinking, being officially bypassed this year by India as the world's most populous country. Credible research suggests that under average models it will shrink to under 750M by 2100. And that's based on official figures; some demographers don't trust those figures, and say it's much worse -- that India actually surpassed China as early as 2014.
At least the values you get if you search google says it is at 1.412 billion and growing at 0.1% as of 2021 (not negative). Forecast that it might drop to 1.31 billion by 2050, so the slowing growth is likely to continue. India is very close to it at 1.408 billion, so highly likely to surpass it.
The one-child policy is long-gone, but nobody is having kids and nobody's moving there.
Yeah you don't hear of too many people moving there. My cousin's daughter moved there recently to study and live with her boyfriend there. I wonder how she will find life there. She is in Hangzhou.
Indeed, enough of them travel abroad to study that countries are loathe to put restrictions on enrolment because universities have come to depend on their tuition income, at rates far higher than locals pay.
But priorities and focus seem to be changing. I've had the fortune to go to China a number of times; in the end, I'd concluded that the risk to my employer was not worth the benefits of being there, given the partnership deals offered by the government agencies.
It does sound like setting up companies in China is not trivial and you don't actually get to fully be in control.
My last trip was to speak at a FOSS conference in Shanghai. At the end of the session, the Q&A focused not on Linux or code or jobs, but obsessed with why my organization was perceived to treat Taiwan as a country. It was devastating and depressing, not a single tech question. Everything there (that I could see) was getting politicized, far more than I'd encountered elsewhere. And, as you know, most Western media is banned there, so we have access to their goings-on -- at least what people are able to say -- but not the opposite. An ICANN conference I attended in Beijing attracted double the normal volume of registrations -- not because locals are more interested in the DNS, but because attendees got access to uncensored wifi.
The jury is out, and not all measures have been implemented. IE, there are no restrictions yet on RISC-V and it may not happen.
It's already started. The fact you haven't heard about it much may speak to its effectiveness. China has targeted exports of specialty metals used in manufacturing of chips, batteries etc. but companies are so far having little trouble finding other sources (including Canada, which is ramping up production).
The rest of the world needs China's production more than they need us I
would think.
Of course limiting trade hurts all parties, but the above assertion is a mistake IMO. Yes, the world has come to see China as its manufacturing plant, but the country also needs to import core necessities such as energy, food and fertilizer, without which it would have widespread famine. And given China's population decline, labour costs there are now higher than in neighbours such as Vietnam. One of the last holdouts, Apple, is moving significant production from China to India.
Well it will be interesting to see what happens. It may not be good, but definitely interesting. -- Len Sorensen
On Sat, Nov 4, 2023 at 9:29 PM Lennart Sorensen < lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
At least the values you get if you search google says it is at 1.412 billion and growing at 0.1% as of 2021 (not negative). Forecast that it might drop to 1.31 billion by 2050, so the slowing growth is likely to continue. India is very close to it at 1.408 billion, so highly likely to surpass it.
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3018829/chinas-population-numbe...
The one-child policy is long-gone, but nobody is having kids and nobody's moving there.
Yeah you don't hear of too many people moving there.
... or even visiting: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/08/30/china-post-covid-19-tourism-foreigners-... My cousin's daughter moved there recently to study and live with her boyfriend
there. I wonder how she will find life there. She is in Hangzhou.
I hope for her sake she is able to leave when she wants to: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-exit-bans-foreigners-xi-rcna82393 It does sound like setting up companies in China is not trivial and you
don't actually get to fully be in control.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-foreign-investment-deficit-bei... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/... Well it will be interesting to see what happens. It may not be good, but
definitely interesting.
There's more than enough "interesting" in the world for me already right now. - Evan
| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | 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. Right. There are a bunch of hard things about making a competitive processor chip or SoC. Designing an Instruction Set Architecture is not one of them (I've done it myself). Launching a new architecture and getting enough infrastructure to be useful seems to be the hardest. RISC-V is almost there. Its design is complete enough to manufacture. There are a bunch of SoCs that you can buy now. Linux runs on them. That genie is out of the bottle. The remaining barriers have nothing to do with RISC-V International. Designing fast implementation designs ("micorarchitecture") is hard. There are open implementations but they lack credibility. That may change. ARM licences a bunch of microarchitecture and most ARM chips use one or two of these. (The major exception is Apple -- they use their own microarchitecture.) The ISA also is missing ancillary functions: - PMIC - USB - GPU - PCIe / NVMe - TPU - SATA - DRAM controller Fabricating chips from these designs is hard too. That's what the US has cracked down on: ASML in the Netherlands has a lock on making masks. This ban hurts a tiny company like the Netherlands a lot. TSMC, headquartered in Taiwan is the leading fab in recent years. They are barred from selling some stuff to PRC. This hurts them a lot. It might be sufficient to cause PRC to invade. A US ban on RISC-V International contributions from the USA will have a few effects: - development will be slowed - China will pull further ahead in control and contribution to RISC-V - US looks like an unreliable partner. (Look at NVidia's stock this week.) In effect China will be ahead from this move. The only way to keep technical leadership is to advance more quickly than you competitors.
participants (4)
-
Alvin Starr -
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Evan Leibovitch -
Lennart Sorensen