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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

This will boost adoption of non US chips by everyone else, and eventually other non US based technologies as well, as other companies take care not to be the next one on the target line.

We are back at the PGP export regulations days.

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there really aren't that many players worldwide. The US and allies control chip making and can choke anyone at least for now. It would be economically unsustainable for most of the countries, the only one that can even dream of producing their own chips is China, but still it will take decades to catch up with modern Western chips.

NATOs GDP is 45% of world GDP. Add to that Japan (3.4%) Australia (0.9%) and South Korea (1.9%) and you have half of world GDP. How can you compete with this block technologically?

The size of the GDP is really just a part of it. Indonesia for example has a high gdp ($1 trillion+) but Switzerland or The Netherlands can make tech that they can't, currently, produce. So it's not like it's half gdp, half the power. It's more like 80% power.

I think some regional players (middle-east like UAE and Saudi Arabia) have enjoyed some playing field in this Russia war because of the circumstances. This might make it look that they have "power" but they don't. Once things calm down, they'll probably regret these decisions.

>the only one that can even dream of producing their own chips is China, but still it will take decades to catch up with modern Western chips.

The reason behind China pushing so hard for RISC-V should be bloody obvious to anyone paying even remote attention to the recent goings on.

The question is whether the west hands China the keys (yet again) by obliging (yet again) their underhanded attempts.

What does ISA have to do with semiconductors? RISC-V is an open ISA, I would have thought that chip fabbing and ISAs are effectively unrelated (the ISA might determine the layout of the silicon but it's not like x86-64 is drastically different... it's all NANDs, right?)

I don't think the "it's IP" argument would hold up, as historically China & CCP don't really care about IP

x86 and ARM are western technologies, technologies superior to RISC-V that China won't be able to access soon (or even right now), acts of espionage aside, with the semiconductor economic sanctions ramping up.

China pushing RISC-V is because they see the writing on the wall and want /something/ that can replace x86 and ARM at relatively low cost, effort, and time; both domestically (to satisfy their own needs) and globally (to once again conquer the world economically).

My personal hope is RISC-V doesn't obtain success and continues as the irrelevant ISA it is today. The true motives behind wider RISC-V adoption do not align with western interests.

Accessing ARM chips isn't a problem for them, secondly markets like China can survive by focusing on their own market.

Taiwan is a country of 24 million people that started from very little at the end of the Chinese civil war. But it had brains and a state-backed plan.

Many countries could have the capability to produce decent chips.

Taiwan relies on Europe to supply it with EUV.

Building the entire supply chain for semiconductors is daunting at best.

EUV is only required for state of the art chips, and it's the same as for my previous comment: The Netherlands are an even smaller country by population. With a long term, strategic vision, many countries could do the same or better.

Now, China has the mass to definitely lead in anything they 'put their mind to' given time.

I was responding to:

> Many countries could have the capability to produce decent chips.

China might be able to, lets see. "Many countries" definitely not.

If Taiwan or Korea can, nothing prevents many countries from doing the same. Certainly it is a certitude that China, India, the UE also can but it also shows that smaller countries can as well with the right governance and vision.

I feel you may not be reading or following this conversation.

My point is: Taiwan cannot make "decent chips" without the cooperation of the US and EU. China may possibly be able to without the US and EU, but roughly no other country could even try to build "decent chips" (i.e. EUV) without the help of the US and EU.

> I feel you may not be reading or following this conversation.

LOL, OK have a nice day.

Taiwan is an incredible success story. How Asia Works (book) covers this.

> will take decades to catch up with modern Western chips

IMO decades a little pessmistic. PRC generating as much STEM talent as roughly OECD combined, with semi only elevated to first-level dicipline in 2018, PRC is spitting out 30k IC graduates per year. They're still about 200k short, ~520k/720k out of what IC talent white paper estimated PRC needed for semi industry. I wadger that's comparable to total direct semi industry talent globally (US currently ~110k), which is really effort from a handful of countries (NL,US,JP,DE) in hardware industry that historically got 2nd pick on talent due to how well software pays/braindrains. People like to meme about how semi is making magic thinking sand but it's also niche industry so far pursued by a (relatively) small amount of people in a handful of countries. I wouldn't be surprised if PRC gets within 1-2 nodes of west in 10 years, and start grabbing market share selling cheap. Of course by then US will start banning software captibility with PRC hardware, triggering another round of PRC indigenization that eats at US software.

Most of the demand for chips, and the vast majority of the strategically important demand, is not for chips made with state-of-the-art fabbing. Slightly old tech and IP is more than enough to become chip independent.

TPUs were added to the control list last year

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