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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese govt is pouring huge amounts of resources into training homegrown chip designers. They're doing it based on RISC-V.

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China can train chip designers just like Israel does, but they are on a path to end up in Intel's predicament, where they don't have the ability to fabricate competitive chips as their foundries are one to two generations outdated.

Who says China will let anybody else compete?

I actually occationally worry about them invading Taiwan...

You and several major governments.

Not a coincidence the US usually has a carrier battle group somewhere between the two.

Cross straight relations is a definite hotspot, China (PRC) maintain Taiwan is still their territory.

The US has traditionally sat as a buffer to prevent China asserting that militarily but with the US becoming more isolationist and the Chinese rapid expanding their blue fleet capabilities it's only a matter of time until things get...tense.

> Not a coincidence the US usually has a carrier battle group somewhere between the two.

The USA hasn't sent an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait since 2007. Barring some major geopolitical shakeup, it is fairly likely it will never do so again.

The PRC maintains Taiwan is part of their territory and the ROC maintains the mainland is part of theirs.

The US has traditionally used Taiwan as yet another military foothold in the Asia-Pacific to project and exert its own influence in the region for geopolitical objectives, the containment of China being one of them.

Looking at the stats of countries invaded, China isn't really a major concern

Why would China need to annex Taiwan when they can simply follow the HK strategy of supporting leaders who are pro-China? Let's face it, if push comes to shove, the US isn't going to do anything except make symbolic statements about Taiwanese sovereignty.

A far more likely scenario would be where the US undertakes overt military action against Iran, wasting money and resources while China sits back and consolidates power in its own sphere of influence.

I dunno, HK was legally handed over to China with international approval (albeit with China bending/breaking the 50 year agreement). Messing with Taiwan’s sovereignty would be a far far greater geopolitical problem.

Although SMIC has a rather poor track record, China is continually funding it. Tsinghua Holdings is also funding another foundry as well I cant remember its name. And they have slapped quite a few TSMC / Samsung people to work for them.

> The Chinese govt is pouring huge amounts of resources into training homegrown chip designers. They're doing it based on RISC-V.

Frankly both of those statements are true of all major industrial nations.

France and Germany put huge amounts of money into training chip designers? Huh?

Germany is investing 3 billion in deep learning accelerators and all the big automotive companies are investing large amounts aswell. They want to own the supply chain, just as they used to. There are even some army guys sitting in the negotiations (unusual for Germany).

Could you point us to some sources for that? I'm really curious

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-intelligence/germ...

Though I don’t trust this. I guess, this money will be accessible only to companies having dedicated departments writing grants (like the big car companies) and it will be wasted at the end. This country should start immediately increasing salaries in research institutions and stop that nonsense with many many 1 year contracts for scientific staff.

IFX are based in Germany, they employ a lot of people doing such work and definitely have a graduate programme..

Name 3 governments that are pumping close to that

UC Berkeley receives hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. Federal government, and some of that is certainly going to the BAR (and they are by far not the only ones). India is outright commissioning the research and design of at least four distinct RISC-V chips (SHAKTI) through IIT Madras. And (although the absolute amounts are smaller, the proportion is not really) many smaller countries through institutions like ETH Zürich are spending a lot of money on microarchitecture and IC design research, most with RISC-V involved.

When it comes to IC design more broadly, just put in Google/DDG the name of an industrial nation and a couple other related words, and enjoy the results.

I could think of more if it was my job, but I don't see why you'd dismiss it out of hand. Why would it be so personally important to you that the Chinese government is seen as greatest state sponsor of microarchitectural research using RISC-V?

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