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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Being in Arm's position sucks now.

Would they not be so enthusiastic about sanctions, Chinese would've been way more cautious jumping on RISC-V boat.

Now instead of having RISC-V as one off research projects, which would have probably died off silently, now they are all treated as survival essential projects.

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>which would have probably died off silently

Given Western digital will be producing millions of risc-v chips, the "it'll die off silently" ship has long since sailed.

https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovations/risc-v

Not many other companies or developers are involved in WDs effort, thats mostly an internal project. There are tens of obscure ISAs and CPUs that are used in similar applications, and no-one is particularly excited about those. But RISC-V seems to have serious momentum in both academia, and as base for upcoming platforms from new companies.

Just remembered that. WD had a humongous recruiting event for chip developers in 2017 in Shenzhen, but nobody was told what was that all about

I agree. I feel like we (USA) are forcing China on a path that will make them more competitive long term.

I wonder if most of what we are doing is being done for political purposes? Sort of, just to look good and get more votes. And if so, you kind of have to admit that from that perspective, the calculation works out even if China surges ahead even faster.

(In fact, you might even be able to use that surge, to do more grandstanding, to get more votes.)

Not saying this is 100% what's going on, but it's undoubtedly a factor in the equation here.

For sure. Third party countries may also decide less risk in buying from China (ie, China less likely to cut them off because of real or perceived issues).

And in the end competition is good for normal people, so great job?

Europe could have stepped up and become competitive long before, but they are too complacent with the status quo. It's good that finally someone steps up.

EU is US ally so they don't see a risk in terms of national security (not just security, but also sanctions etc) to invest.

The same thing happened when China wanted to join the ISS[1] - the US Congress blocked this to avoid "tech transfer". Instead of being dejected and sad, China kickstarted its space station program, and are now collaborating with Europe.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...

The best thing for China is that this is happening at a time where the US is insistent that the brightest Chinese minds in the US go back to China, and the ones in China, stay there.

It's genius. Genius, I tell ya. But the current administration doesn't care, because the negative impacts will only be felt a decade from now.

It is probably no coincidence that ARM was sold to Softbank right when RISC-V was starting to make a name for itself. They saw the writing on the wall.

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