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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

The stolen architectures cannot be legitimately sold outside of China, due to patents held by ARM ltd. RISC-V avoids these headaches.

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Indeed, but conversely, China will have access to ARM no matter what. This also means that we can sanction all we want, they locally have the fabs and IP to create ARM, RISC-V, MIPS and even x86 CPUs (and they are already doing all of that). Granted, their fabs can't do top-of-the-line lithography (yet?) but since they have already created 64-core ARM server CPUs and some custom AI silicon they can get horizontally scaled performance regardless. This is of course their focus: make sure they can make computers and related equipment domestically no matter what.

They do have access to ARM, sure. But they also have access to RISC-V, which is technically superior and free of the troubles associated with ARM.

What is superior about RISC V technically?

Code density is a good one.

L1$ is always starved, thus it is always good to fit more code in it.

China wants to sell chips and gadgets with chips inside. Legally questionable access to ARM will not help with that. RISC-V solves the problem.

Aren't the countries that would care about the legalities and patents the same countries that would be sanctioning them? I don't know who will adopt risc-v for high performance. Nvidia maybe? Intel-lattice-altera-intelgpu. Amd-ati-xilinx. Nvidia wanted to be nvidia-arm but as that didn't work, maybe risc-v? No big fpga players for them to pick up though.

FWIW it most likely doesn't matter if they can't be sold outside of China. the domestic market is large enough.

Does anyone outside of China want Chinese spy chips regardless of architecture?

Why do you call them "spy" chips? Have they been found to generally have backdoors?

In an embedded context, a lot of that doesn't matter either way - your dumb coffee maker doesn't have a lot of opportunity to spy on you anyway. Smart devices are a very different story. However, Chinese embedded chips are often very cheap for the capabilities.

And all Intel and AMD processors have "spy" capabilities too with the built-in black-box Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor. And it's only becoming more powerful and commonplace with remote attestation and Microsoft Pluton. In a few years PCs might become just like mobile phones - the bootloader locked down requiring signed images from Microsoft, etc.

Given all of that, China seems like a great option if they produce RISC-V processors.

If they produce "spy" risc-v processors, no.

State sponsored extortion is still a thing.

In a few years PCs might become just like mobile phones - the bootloader locked down requiring signed images from Microsoft, etc.

The number of Windows-exclusive programs are rapidly dwindling. In a few years, it may not be such a big deal to simply avoid that with Linux (or FreeBSD).

Tons of hobbyists buy PINE hardware. All of their SoCs are Chinese (Rockchip, Allwinner). Hardkernel/Odroid stuff is a mix of Amlogic, Intel, and Rockchip.

Outside the hobbyist space people do seem to be shunning Chinese SoCs AFAICT. Maybe no name TV boxes have rockchips, but other than that not much.

What non-Chinese options do hobbyist boards have? NXP chips seems almost impossible to get for the hobbyist market. I’m not sure why. Broadcom for the RPI’s we’re probably only possible because the creators had worked at Broadcom.

Amlogic and NXP mostly. Some mediatek boards are popping up, although they tend to be pricier.

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