RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war | Hacker News Reader

RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground in US-China tech war

reuters.com

139 pointsmmastrac106 comments

When I was working in China one of the most common readings of Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem was to take the Trisolarans as a stand-in for the US, and it doesn't seem too far off the mark with proposals like this.

Trying to intefere with the development of open source hardware isn't just regulating products any more, that's just throwing a wrench into the scientific process.

This is the kind of perspective I don't hear from within the US. How far does the metaphor go? Is it just the meddling, superiority complex, and halting of technological advance? Or do other Trisolaran traits such as inability to lie also have an analogue?

(I kind of doubt it goes too deep. Liu is great at concepts but the worldbuilding was not super in depth.)

> Is it just the meddling, superiority complex, and halting of technological advance?

For the most part it wasn't much more deep than that, although one more subtle point was that there were also a lot of comparisons between the chaotic and unstable climate of Trisolaris due to its multiple suns and the perceived political / cultural disorder and division in the US, in contrast to the stable climate of Earth.

I’m wondering which technology they mean? It doesn’t seem to be in the article.

Surely not RISC-V instruction formats? That’s just the API. It doesn’t seem like the hard part of making a chip?

From the article:

    Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House select committee on China,
    said in a statement to Reuters that the Commerce Department needs to "require any
    American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC
    (People's Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology."

>That’s just the API. It doesn’t seem like the hard part of making a chip?

When I look at the number of x86 competitors, I'm pretty sure that is the hardest part by far...

I can see both of the sides of the argument.

It seems that we use US funding to help everyone circumvent ARM and x86.

The problem is that US enemies are also recipients of the US technology contributions.

But what is the alternative? Stop publishing everything ?

Exactly. You make everything illegal or “regulated” (practically banned). The EU is already leading the way and has touched machine learning, end-to-end capable encryption and software distribution in various of its regulation directives.

- Communications (every chat software must come with spyware installed)

- AI (machine learning is too scary and authors say it will kill mankind, worse than a climate change)

- RISC-V (terrorists can use it in missiles)

- Open source (terrorists can run missiles and super computers with Linux)

- Software distribution (either because of communications or AI)

- Cryptocurrency wallets (interacting with a software wallet you wrote yourself makes your a suspicious and banks will deplatform you on the basis of anti-money laundering)

You need to remember that end-to-end encryption exporting was illegal in the US until 90s. Now when Trump has stacked supreme court with his own sockpuppets they may want to reverse any decision regarding this like they did with abortion.

I just will say regulation doesnt equal ban. And that i am pretty sure EU didnt ban open source, RISC-V, encryption or software distribution. Some EU member states politicians have stupid ideas about communications/encryption so they push proposals but these are also often corporate lobby to gain more control over the networks. And afaik nothing has passed into actual law.

If anything EU has been generaly aiming their regulations at the american big tech which many see as vultures feeding on users and most importantly avoiding taxes.

China and companies from China have done a lot of work on RISC-V. So the US is also recipient of China technology.

Its kind of the point of open source.

> "require any American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC (People's Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology."

How would that end up working?

I've seen situations in which exports restrictions came up, and which resulted in design or manufacturing being restructured, so that more work was shifted to be done in the restricted country. Which also meant that more know-how was developed in the restricted country. Which I don't think was the (ostensible) intended outcome. It might've had short-term benefits for some companies, though.

What the hell does that even mean for open source? Need an export license to run a frigging GitHub project if it has anything to do with RISC-V at all? Does a compiler with a RISC-V target count? Projects with RISC-V builds?

Yes to all, technically. It won't matter usually, but technically. Weapons export controls are getting absurd that buying Chinese to get around is totally an option now.

Like, seen those silver tablet thing for screening COVID in visitors? They are ALL designed and built by Chinese companies using really good and completely unlocked Chinese thermal cameras, because, access to Western versions of such high technology could "pose threat" to the Western world and is therefore severely restricted.

And they ALL record every faces it's seen, which are often not GUI discoverable nor exportable but extractable by sshing into, because of course they do and they are.

And that is what export control schemes are doing.

If you set aside the absurdity of applying it to RISC-V for a second, yes, that is exactly what export control means. Any such regulated technology can't be exported (for a very well defined and strict definition of "exported"). Posting it on GitHub definitely counts as an export controls violation.

> more work was shifted to be done in the restricted country

Yes and it cost them more overall. People who design sanctions know well that they provide a powerful incentive to the development of indigenous alternatives in the target country. The calculus is that on balance, it is more desirable to force the target country to waste their resources on catching up (or on circumventing sanctions). The point is to make things more expensive.

In practice, how much is it this calculus, and how much is it lobbyists for companies with fairly short-term commercial goals?

In the country applying export sanctions, what companies draw short-term benefits? Usually most commercial actors would rather be able to export anything anywhere.

I suspect (but have no concrete evidence) that the real motivation behind this is that one or more companies feel threatened by risc-v, and hope that they by hindering collaboration, they can hobble their competitors on both sides of the ocean.

Marco Rubio, the senator pushing for this, received 250k from SoftBank in 2022.

I'm sorry, I'm not following. What does receiving money from SoftBank in particular imply?

Probably the same thing the grandparent post is implying? :)

SoftBank owns ARM (or owned at that time).

Thanks, that makes it clear now. I looked them up, but didn't find that part out.

It seems like he received $14100

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/softbank-corp/recipients?id...

I suspect too.

It comes 1 week after ARM IPO.

Is it just me or is this strong cryptography export control again?

Honestly if I get better chips I have no problems with RISC-V

What do you know, they might not even be backdoored.

How do you tell US chips are not backdoored?

I'm saying the opposite.

I know, but there's certainly bits of US CPUs that are not publicly discoverable - and past pressure from US government agencies for backdoors into systems

Ideally we should be building systems that are open enough to be able to tell these things, certainly if we want to trust a system then all the boot code, from the first instruction should be public - whether it's built in China or the US

That's what I was alluding to in the first place.

What happened to “May the best player win”?

The US can throw a fit, but technology is inherently human and RISC-V is an open instruction format.

Sooner or later China will get a powerful working chip. Not in the best interest of US to be an enemy of a billion person nation. Esp the nation that is the world’s factory.

When China couldn’t supply PPP gear in Covid, 100s of thousands died.

I’d rather wish our Senators work on bringing manufacturing back to US instead of playing no-trade games.

What happened to the level playing field? China doesn't invest and open source anything, why should the US subsidize their technological advancement?

The C910 is one of the most popular RISC-V processor designs and it is open source and from China.

> China doesn't invest and open source anything

I actually wrote a blog on that (2019)

https://blog.est.im/201906/stdout-003

Let me know when you have an example of an open source Chinese industry standard, essentially subsidized by the Chinese government. The only example I can think of is Beidou, which nobody uses.

> an open source Chinese industry standard, essentially subsidized by the Chinese government

Hey I do have an example: Richard Stallman's only computer is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Not exactly a well-organized open source community but it's there https://github.com/loongson-community/

A modern one is https://www.openatom.org/ not many popular projects though but it's state-funded.

> Beidou, which nobody uses.

except iPhone 11/12/13/14/15 (with the XMM 7660 chip) and every Android phone using Qualcomm iZat chip (shipped with almost every Snapdragon processor since 2013)

And it's not "open-source" per se, Beidou is just some kind of satellite signal that happens to be compatible with GNSS protocol, so chip makers and make few tweaks to provide location service.

iPhone since 12 has not used the Intel modem, and while newer iPhones supports Beidou, it’s not clear which chip supports it and whether it is used outside of China, or even iPhones sold outside of China has support for Beidou. Even if it does, its civilian frequency only has a 10 meter accuracy outside of APAC, so it’s not clear to me it is used globally in the sense that GPS is.

Also, Loongson and OpenATOM lol. Are they industry standards?

Literally every open source RISC-V Chip, SoC and Board I know are Chinese, aside from SiFive. Alibaba T-Head Xuantie C9-series and E9-series CPU cores, StarFive JH7110 SoC, Alibaba T-Head TH1520 SoC, SOPHON SG2042 SoC, StarFive JH8100 SoC (TBA), several RISC-V boards from Milk-V, BananaPi and SiPeed which are state of the art RISC-V boards.

I think US are the ones doing less.

Edit: Just realized SiFive was US based, not Chinese, so edited it out.

And the Chinese says thank you Uncle Sam for giving us RISC-V for free.

An open source ISA is a collaborative effort, and it contains several members, not just from the US. And it was inevitable either way. Going against who uses an open source an open source ISA is against open source, and going against open source is capitalist greed.

I won't be debating that, there are plenty of resources to read on it and it's a big topic if you are so deeply opposed to it.

I thought SiFive is actually one of the best though?

Espressif has a bunch of Risc-V designs too. Not high performance but easy to find and use.

Yes, but I'm only talking about Chinese ones here. And considering just the open source boards, as I did, SiFive only has their Freedom series chips and boards, and their contributions to the Rocket Chip project.

All the Chinese ones I listed are open source designs.

And even if you hate China, it does not justify the opposition to using an open source ISA as a whole. It benefits everyone around the globe, and USA is not a special country. Others can use the ISA just the same, and it's better for them to do so.

You guys thinking in terms of countries is just as big of a problem, but again I don't have the time for that philosophy.

RISC-V is all about not bowing down to one company, or one country - cheaper better chips from China are just as good as cheaper better chips from the USA or Europe - and competition, that great capitalist American institution, is a good thing here - we don't need any archaic old cold warriors messing with our markets

> cheaper better chips from China are just as good as cheaper better chips from the USA or Europe

This may be a bit naive. How do you make sure that there are no intentional security issues / backdoors in Chips from a vendor?

An interesting clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfXxgb9N_qI .

Most of the chips I've seen China clone are the cheap microcontrollers that couldn't really run malware if it tried. STM32s and down have been cloned sans-licensing for over a decade now, while something like RISC-V would enable vendors worldwide to compete with Chinese knock-offs legally. Bringing the barrier of IP down benefits everyone except the tax-collectors for the current IP.

You can't, in the same way as with x86 and ARMs widely used today. Frankly, most people simply do not care. They gladly accept shit like Intel ME, so it's a lost battle.

At least, with RISC-V there is a chance we will get full stack open hardware implementations. They likely will be far from the cutting edge, but sufficient for many applications.

> This may be a bit naive. How do you make sure that there are no intentional security issues / backdoors in Chips from a vendor?

Seems like you're confusing designs (that is to say, speech) and actual manufactured chips, the two are not the same

You need to find ways that work - Chinese (and American, or Russian or North Korean) vendors can publish their masks, their RTL, if they want to be trusted.

Oh please, what is Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor? that is the most obvious and blatant backdoor in every Intel/AMD chip there is.

I am tired as someone from a third country to get "national security" be used as an excuse to fight a trade war. Every single electronic is way more expensive as a result, damaging peoples livelihoods because we want to maintain our ridiculous huge profit margin per sale.

Just look at the new Iphone, it has $35 of titanium.

Watching that clip, it is hilarious how Zuckerberg has pivoted over the years.

In 2015, when Zuckerberg still had hope that Facebook would be allowed to operate in China, Zuckerberg asked Xi Jinping to name his baby.[0] Xi, probably taken aback by the sheer level of sycophancy, turned Zuckerberg down: "Too much responsibility."

Now, Zuckerberg has gone entirely the opposite direction, denouncing the Chinese government, pushing for a TikTok ban, and so on.

0. https://youtu.be/S20BoxH8W9g?si=X1hAG12pquY-Y_i7

On the bright side, at least he didn't get his arm twisted by the PRC in the long-run. A lot of tech companies (cough Apple, Tesla cough) are going to have to pay the piper soon. It's gonna get ugly before it gets better.

What is the incentive for big giants like Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia to adopt RISC-V? Isn't their moat their in-house chips?

I guess it is more about companies which don't have their own proprietary chips or companies in developing nations.

Really, it's for anyone who's core competency isn't selling general-purpose compute, but will have to design their own ASICs anyway.

For example, when WD open-sourced their SweRV cores in 2019, they also committed to shipping 1 billion copies of the particular design. Beyond just the software ecosystem, they might be looking at incentivizing IP vendors to contribute to a rich ecosystem of interconnects, peripherals, and design/verification software.

>> What is the incentive for big giants like Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia to adopt RISC-V? Isn't their moat their in-house chips?

Every chip company other than Intel and AMD licenses designs or ISA from ARM. Risc-V has no licensing fees if you design your own, and there are even free designs out there.

It's not feasible to create your own instruction set. You also have to build a whole bunch of software infrastructure for it and convince people to use it and port apps to it. Intel doesn't license x86. ARM costs money, and RISC-V is an open standard that was competently designed by some very smart people. It is also the 3rd most well supported ISA from a software point of view.

Understood now it makes sense.

It is feasible to have your own instruction set. Many companies have done it, its just a pretty bad idea and everybody that has done it wants to stop doing it.

I can't help but think this tech war will be a positive for most of us. Both China and the US seem to think they need a rival, and if they want to do it over chips I think it can only spur on innovation in open source hardware.

The lawmakers raising this topic with Biden are being lobbied in part by ARM? Probably. RISC-V is mostly a threat to ARM more than anyone else.

"The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips."

In other words

"We should be the best .. they should not be allowed to be the best!"

When the USA feels threatened by a rising power the answer is usually to cripple the rise rather than directly compete

Seems pretty universal throughout history, and no different with even China themselves. If a country feels threatened, they retaliate/seek to block it.

Our PM asked for an inquiry into the origins of covid, and China banned our beef, wine, barley, and coal imports.

There was no inquiry. Seems China won that one.

> "I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software - whether in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI - and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed," Warner said in a statement to Reuters.

This is clearly an attack on open source. Seems incredibly odd that they use the word "export" to refer to information (that is to say: speech)

I really wonder which corporations are lobbying for this stupidity, I'd like to hear some fucking names so I can boycott them

the quote sounds like it came from someone who didn't really fully grasp the phrase and the implications of what 'export control' might look like in reference to open-source.

it's rich too listening to a senator talking as if the concept of open-source blindsided them given that the attention of Washington has been the very thing the various OSS groups having been working towards since forever.

> the quote sounds like it came from someone who didn't really fully grasp the phrase and the implications of what 'export control' might look like in reference to open-source.

Or didn't study recent history., the export control on strong encryption meant that American contributors would follow the letter of the law, and others outside of the US - eg Canadians for BouncyCastle[1] - would freely provide the missing illegal-to-export functionality to the rest of the world.

1. If memory serves, an American cryptographer once crossed into Canada to perform a 'forbidden commit'. The functionality technically wasn't an export of the US

They’ve done this before, famously with encryption software.

prz and djb did great work to stop it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

> After four years and one regulatory change, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional.

FWIW, I imagine in 4-5 years this “battle” will pretty much already be decided wrt chipmaking in China.

> FWIW, I imagine in 4-5 years this “battle” will pretty much already be decided wrt chipmaking in China.

If I'm understanding you correctly...

It's not that easy for China (or the US) to spin up their own fabs, particularly ones that compete to those in Taiwan. Even with some expertise and fat pockets, you might not get the same results. It's a lot of trial and error and improving yield for small processes to the point where it's economical.

On top of that, the cutting edge is already developing in Taiwan (i.e. next gen fabs).

That's why Taiwan is such a coveted area for the PRC (and the US) -- besides the traditional political issues regarding their exodus from mainland China.

“China is expected to outnumber all other regions in new chip manufacturing facilities, with 20 supporting mature technologies planned.”

https://www.semi.org/en/news-media-press-releases/semi-press...

Why is it not easy for China to spin up their own fabs? They have a strategic plan / industrial policy[1]. They have the industrial base[2][3]. They have pumping out engineering graduates[3]. †

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

[2] “From 1900 to 1999, the US produced 4.2 billion tonnes of cement. It consumed 4.4 billion tonnes.

China produced 2.4 billion tonnes in 2020, and 2.5 billion tonnes in 2021. This means it produced 4.9 billion tonnes in these two years.”

(China produced more cement in two years than the US did in the whole 20th century)

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-us-cement

[3] “China is by far the world’s largest silicon producer, with a production volume estimated at six million metric tons in 2022.

The total production volume of silicon worldwide was an estimated 8.8 million metric tons that year.”

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260896/china-silicon-pr...

[4] “China awarded 1.38 million engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2020. The comparable American number is 197,000 (144,000 in engineering and 54,000 in computer science), or just one-seventh of China’s total.”

https://asiatimes.com/2022/07/a-tale-of-two-talents/

† You know the way we have this mental model in our heads for the size of the US economy post WWII versus the rest of the world?, we're going to have to update our mental model of the size of China's economy today versus the rest of the world.

Yeah but quantity has always been chinas strength. Where they have historically struggled is quality. If they can bring the quality up to acceptable levels then those numbers would be truly impressive. That’s what they are striving for

Quality of what compared to who? Tiktok is winning.

As is the iPhone. Chinese manufacturing is unparalleled.

Comac is also quite instructive.

Comac is the opposite of quality and the iPhone quality is so high because Apple is able to set and hold their high western qa standards. A domestic industry would have to struggle with the supply can taking shortcuts at every level and that’s much harder of a task. That’s why Chinese concrete is often poor quality, it could be higher quality they know how to make it at high quality levels but it isn’t due to rampant cheating.

The US is also not great at quality (but good at innovating at speed at the expense of all else). Think Detroit and the waste of engineering talent at FAANGs.

Some companies can make quality items but I agree not universal or guaranteed. It’s just that historically fraud has been low but every year it gets worse and is more common.

Didn't the us government recently force krakenSDR to pull down their passive radar software under these laws? That would seem to violate precedent.

According to the following link:

https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/open-source-passive-radar-ta...

> There’s no indication that there’s been any legal action from the USA government – the team’s being proactive, as fas as we’re told.

> FWIW, I imagine in 4-5 years this “battle” will pretty much already be decided wrt chipmaking in China.

Ay, for sure by 2030 at current rates of development

It's puzzling to read the statement that China "abuses" open technology not controlled by a country or a business entity. China's contribution to RISC-V, as well as that of other countries, is not restricted and can be freely used by anyone and any country.

If this kind of sabotage against open technologies by the US because the "CCP uses it" truly materializes, it would mark a significant decline in the US spirit, which is originally about confidence, openness, and entrepreneurship.

This whole article is US government propaganda. Just look how they need to prepend "Communist" to "China" to make a point (not).

RISC-V is an American made, American owned design that just happens to be open source hardware friendly.

Reuters is acting like this is some sort of a) amazing new technology that isn't just the newest iteration of a 30 year old architecture family, b) owned and created by China, and c) this isn't just some ploy by the Republicans to harm American interests abroad to protect their own private investments.

What a crap article.

>American made

While it indeed has American roots and a huge amount of development is done today by American citizens, various people and companies from China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and many European countries have significant contributions as well.

>American owned design

Nope. It's "owned" by the RISC-V International Association registered in Switzerland.

I've looked into the "why" of that, since I, too, wondered why a design that comes from the University of Berkeley (the home of BSD) lives there: international legal protection and tax reasons.

That said, because of that, you could also say it belongs to the entire world, equally, and I would be happy with that description as well; but politicians don't really understand those words, and only think in terms of tribal football.

I thought it was mostly to avoid US politics and possible tech bans export? Especially since the RISC V foundation is a non profit.

You’re correct - there’s obviously no tax benefit since nonprofits have no tax obligation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence they moved there in the midst of all the last administration’s saber rattling with China. The previous entity was HQed in the US and then merged into a Swiss entity so pretty safe to assume why.

It's a spec, explicitly not owned by anyone (if it is it's by a Swiss based consortium) - the hardware people build from the spec may not be opensource (though many are)

It's not just Republicans, it's Democrats as well. Warner is a Democrat.

What is next? Linux? GitHub? Wikipedia?

Sheer f**g hubris.

Wikipedia is already quite a bit of a battleground for a wide variety of interests. Linux seems like the obvious path to avoiding depending on and trusting Microsoft, although I don't know if China cares that much right now.

Linux sees a lot of contributions from China (Loongson, Huawei, many smaller vendors) and especially Loongson has gotten pretty good with working with upstream to get their architecture (LoongArch) into GCC, binutils, libc …

I'm glad I don't see a single comment here supporting this nonsense. I hope some of the intelligence and understanding from this community permeates to the general public should these morons attempt to proceed with their ill-conceived plan.

Tell them how China is using github, stackoverflow and Linux.

Tell them how China is using SMS.

Once the guys learn general relativity is used by GPS, they may just want to ban that … neither the US nor the world can afford this type of stupidity …

GPS is US government invented, owned, and operated. Reagan made it free for use by anyone.

Seems like the ARM lobbyists are making moves

ARM is a company from the UK, so we'd hear this from the UK government if the ARM lobbists were making moves. It's probably Intel or just dumb senators who heard about RISC-V but not MIPS which was also open sourced.

Lobbying will be done where you'll get max bang for buck.

Rubio received 250k from SoftBank last year.

Tell them how china is using .cn! They didn’t even pull that trigger in case of .ru.

ICANN is the space laser that I hope they never discover they have

Net is designed to route around nuclear war, I'm sure we can all work together and route around the US congress

I don't know about China but Russia explicitly plans to keep its internet working even if the cables are cut at the border.

ICANN's official position is "politics has no place in ICANN".

A country TLD belongs to that country, period. As long as that country exists (or has historically existed during the timeframe of TLD ownership, in the cases of legacy TLDs such as .s(oviet)u(nion)), they have exclusive use and control of it.

Yes, that even means if the Internet existed in the 1930s, some-anti-jew-website.gov.de could legally and rightfully exist as a registered domain under the German TLD, and not be in violation of ICANN rules, no matter how disgusting, wrong, and harmful that website is.

It is up to the registry owner of that TLD to enforce laws relevant to their locality and the Internet. To continue with the example, today's .de, obviously, would not allow such a domain to be registered, especially not from their own government, and also not be in violation of ICANN rules to enforce that.

Well, fuck.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com