Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V
bunniestudios.com
bunniestudios.com
No politician or regulator would like to be labelled as someone who favored a foreign competitor country.
Sounds like the letter/blog post already does make this point?
Frequently, politicians prioritize their personal agendas and interests, so it's essential to thoroughly address those aspects.
PS: I'm not a US national, so I'm only analyzing the topic rather than engaging in it.
[1] https://hsci.harvard.edu/impact-federal-policy-global-compet...
No, it's called bribery. If you give a politician money it's bribery. The closest we have to this is the revolving door.
Lobbying involves paying someone to give your letter to an elected. When you call your representative, you are lobbying. When the EFF engages the Congress, they are lobbying. There is campaign contributions, which go to a campaign, not the individual, and PACs, which involve buying messaging. But conflating bribery and lobbying is simply incorrect.
Sounds to me like a call for more investment in RISC-V, not less.
https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
See: https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html
I'm picturing RISC-V processors being sold in boxes that are actually small bible-like books with ornate binding, full of paper printed source code, with small hollows inside where the chips fit.
Yes but that's very similar to how the EUV "ban" works too. As long as you can get a license it's fine but getting the license is expected to be very hard and probably represents a big enough of a risk that you can't base your business around that. So effectively it is a ban.
The license thing does give the executive branch a good deal of leverage when negotiating with China. I think this is likely what the US is really after anyways. It's a pretty hard nosed renegotiation of the existing relationship by both sides.
"Urgent action is needed to prevent U.S. technology and technical know-how from contributing to the PRC’s utilization of this technology."
"the United States should build a robust ecosystem for open-source collaboration among the U.S. and our allies while ensuring the PRC is unable to benefit from that work."
tfw lawyers don't understand what "open source" means :facepalm:
wait no not like that
I guess that's why the far right wing is trying to take over before we have to have elections again.
I'm just curious if swinging back and forth between left and right wing isn't more destructive than just right wing.
The british were the first to go through the industrial revolution and had the best, most precise machine tool technology. They banned export of this technology to the USA. Well, turns out you can bootstrap precision, moving from less precise to more precise machine tools if you're careful manage your errors well.
Soon enough, the USA had caught up and then pulled ahead in machine tool technology.
Oct 6 (Reuters) - In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China - a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders.
At issue is RISC-V, pronounced "risk five," an open-source technology that competes with costly proprietary technology from British semiconductor and software design company Arm Holdings (O9Ty.F). RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.
Some lawmakers - including two Republican House of Representatives committee chairmen, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner - are urging Biden's administration to take action regarding RISC-V, citing national security grounds.
The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V.
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."
Such calls to regulate RISC-V are the latest in the U.S.-China battle over chip technology that escalated last year with sweeping export restrictions that the Biden administration has told China it will update this month.
"The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips. U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws," Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters.
McCaul said he wants action from the Bureau of Industry and Security, the part of the Commerce Department that oversees export-control regulations, and would pursue legislation if that does not materialize.
The bureau "is constantly reviewing the technology landscape and threat environment, and continually assessing how best to apply our export control policies to protect national security and safeguard core technologies," a Commerce Department spokesperson said in a statement.
"Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry," Rubio said in a statement to Reuters. "If we don't broaden our export controls to include this threat, China will one day surpass us as the global leader in chip design."
"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.
RISC-V is overseen by a Swiss-based nonprofit foundation that coordinates efforts among for-profit companies to develop the technology.
The RISC-V technology came from labs at the University of California, Berkeley, and later benefited from funding by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its creators have compared it to Ethernet, USB and even the internet, which are freely available and draw on contributions from around the world to make innovation faster and cheaper.
They are fairly broad and stipulate that US persons cannot transfer technology to any company on an entity list. iirc there was a clarification to the rule that also put a burden on US persons to confirm that they aren't working with a trading front or shell company for the listed entities, which makes any interaction potentially hazardous, because how are you even supposed to check for that?
Note that violations of these rules can "include up to 20 years of imprisonment and up to $1 million in fines per violation, or both" [2]. And the use of "US persons" language means that it's not just companies, it's individual developers too.
If you read the text of the rules, they restrict any kind of technology transfer to these companies. In the case of selling fabrication equipment, that's...fairly clear cut. Don't sell stuff to people on the list, and your deal was probably a few million dollars anyways so you can afford lawyers to research if you're dealing with a shell company.
But the concern is for RISC-V "technology transfer", what happens if you push to a git repository, and...someone from one of these entities pulls your commits? Are you now liable? What if you give a lecture on RISC-V, and someone from one of these entities was in attendance?
Or perhaps you're in charge of crafting an IP strategy for your SoC company. If you pick RISC-V, the ambiguous and changing rules around who you can license your products to is problematic; a client you have today could end up being banned tomorrow. Whereas if you license an ARM core, you don't have to worry about going to jail. It then becomes a no-brainer to just license the ARM core.
Basically, the concern is they will copy/paste the existing rules that are somewhat more tightly confined because they apply to atoms, but instead insert language referring to bits and ideas.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/13/2022-21...
[2] https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oee/penalties
I was thinking to myself, there's no way that someone's acting like it's 1988 again, and we have to embargo this from leaving the country for fear Saddam Hussein will use it to construct a 50 megaflops supercomputer with which to pre-calculate artillery firing solution tables.
Then I clicked, and it really is that dumb. Way to go Congress.
And I imagine Nvidia export restrictions will accelerate the continued development of alternative technologies for AI/ML.
Not only has Xi blocked the West from accessing China’s domestic market, but Xi has essentially helped end globalism and started decoupling with his foolish wolf warrior diplomatic policy and the belligerent nine dash line. Let’s also not forget about Xi’s invasion plans for Taiwan ie we’re likely headed for war https://youtu.be/plHRRFHZ_f0
You cannot ignore those issues if you want people to take your position seriously.
https://www.businessinsider.com/major-us-tech-companies-bloc...
I’m sure there are more US companies and industries that are not allowed to compete in China’s domestic market.
The GDPR is protectionist legislation for EU companies, but it doesn’t prevent US companies from doing business in the EU. It’s a terrible comparison to the CCP’s outright ban on many US companies.
All I know is that there has been a large swath of US and other Western companies that are barred from doing business in China. That’s a fact. As to why, it’s likely protectionism for local mainland companies who wouldn’t have been able to compete.
Just like Tesla, Ford, and GM follow Chinese laws and can operate in China.
The other companies refused to follow Chinese laws, so they aren't allowed to do business in China.
2. It’s already a well known and accepted phenomenon
The burden of proof is still on you since you’re making a claim that goes against accepted facts, while NOT providing anything concrete to back it up.
We’re not getting anywhere. there is no point in continuing this conversation
Actually it does, because of extraterritoriality of US laws.
China wants to catch up, and they will with or without US help. The only question is whether the USA will work to remain competitive by mastering new domains, or whether it will sit back on it's laurels and the technology it's already mastered.
The development of cheap and ubiquitous RISC-V processors has major implications for the economics of putting software into devices. When modern military and civilian tech relies on doing that? This is one of the areas you need to be pushing into to stay competitive.
In their report, the US gov wants open source collaboration on RISC-V between the US and it's allies.....while also excluding china. Sorry, not fucking possible.
You can either have open colaboration where anyone can participate, and yeah, that means somebody might secretly be working for the PRC, or you have no open colaboration at all. There is NO middle ground, and any attempt to create one will simply kill the open colaboration.
Kill the open collaboration in the USA, and the USA falls behind. All the other countries in the world will continue to collaborate on RISC-V, in the EU, in china, japan, austrailia, canada, and wherever else, and none of that will translate into increased experience or capability for the US. The USA becomes a pure consumer of other people's tech, never contributing anything back for fear that it might find it's way to someone in china either directly or by way of someone else engaging in open colaboration.
> All the other countries in the world will continue to collaborate on RISC-V, in the EU, in china, japan, austrailia, canada, and wherever else, and none of that will translate into increased experience or capability for the US.
Yes, and as long as mainland Chinese entities don’t get official support and consultation that is perfectly fine. You can’t stop unofficial support because open source, which is fine.
I can also guarantee that all of the countries that you listed will take the US stance, especially Japan and Australia. anyone would with any familiarity of geopolitics would know that
The PLA navy and the navies of the US and its allies such as Japan, the UK, and Australia are getting ready for combat in the South China Sea as we speak. You cannot ignore that unless you want a weak argument
This is about export of technology, which you are doing whenever you post open source implementations of RISC-V technology online. The lawmakers are explicitly concerned that chinese technology companies benefit whenever a US person shares designs or code online. They are specifically, explicitly seeking that all allied countries be able to freely exchange open source stuff, but that the PRC be excluded from this open source exchange.
Here, let me quote it for you: "In response, the United States should build a robust ecosystem for open-source collaboration among the U.S. and our allies while ensuring the PRC is unable to benefit from that work."
As for whether this is achievable? It's not. In a world with global internet, "don't share the stuff you post online with china" can only be implemented as "don't share the stuff you made online." There is no other way. What they're describing is contradictory. You can't have an ecosystem of open source collaboration while ALSO preventing a specific entity from benefiting from it.
It doesn't especially matter whether other countries are on board with this, since the above even prevents US persons from being able to openly share with each other. They can enact the same policies if they want, or if the US wants them to, but it only replicates the same fundamental problem. Nothing can be shared online, on this great global internet, without also sharing it with the PRC.
This isn't even the first time that the US government has attempted something like this. They tried back in the 90's to block export of cryptographic implementations, including open source ones like GPG, to other countries by posting them on the internet. It was rendered a moot point when someone published the source code of GPG under the first amendment in a book as an act of protest.
However, I still feel that this aggressive stance is still good overall as a starting framework for barring people and companies from providing direct, paid, specialized support for China e.g. expertise in building anything related to chip foundries, et al.
Globalism as we know it will be dead soon
everyone else could use encryption to provide secure products, and US vendors couldn't
Yes- Us Weapons platforms are.
This is how the us build pure cold war style "for military use only" tech. The money wasted reinventing the wheel by defense contractors is why Americans will never have affordable healthcare or sustainable social services.
China simply doesn't do that afaik, it's civilian and military tech isn't always developed independently.
Restated: China blurs the line between military and police state tech. It's tech is frequently multi purpose.
Drones, bipedal and quad petal robots, ai/ml applications etc. Are not 10-20 years old. They are running the latest risc-v cores.
China being "more socialist" really embraced open source, multi use, drtw. It could be many reasons.
I was surprised to discover one the boards an esp32-cam (xtensa core) purchased off aliexpress was originally designed to be used in ccp military/police surveillance applications. I don't know which came first, but the esp32-cam board is so extremely well suited for that specific military application that the entire design and layout of the board made sense to me.
Espressif a Shanghai based company now is making both xtensa and risc-v chips.
Sometimes, we have to re-evaluate our positions. We cannot risk supplying our enemies with stuff they can turn around and use as weapons against ourselves any more. The sooner broader society wakes up and realizes that we, as collective Western nations, are at war, the better. It may not be a "conventional" war yet, but that doesn't make it less dangerous!
I agree on that when it comes to a ton of the "anti terror" measures introduced after 9/11 because these are plain bullshit that don't do any objective good, other than annoy passengers.
But regarding high tech capability? Not at all. We have to do everything we can to impede China's progress there, at all costs - because the cost of a Chinese victory would be outright catastrophic.
(And spoiler: modern technology won't give them victory over the West. Not even close.)
If we promote free market (more or less, nothing is pure), freedom of speech and many others as those should be respected as much as it is possible.
We are departing from that and I think it is harmful for us. We should not be blaming enemies for these things.
If everyone is turning to chinese manufacturers for their fancy new microcontrollers, american firms stop making them or die. Now chna's the only supplier.
Next thing you know, china's conflict with taiwan goes hot and china threatens to cut off exports of chips and products using them to anyone that intervenes. Sudently the USA takes the place of russia, who are scavenging STM32s from washing machines because of their war with ukraine.
-Banks - who ought to be quoted more often, here and elsewhere
except you aren't at war, you're trying to start one
I would rather like it for there to be no war. The problem is, that decision is not mine, it is not ours to make - China and Russia did that for us, decades ago, when they decided to wage cyber warfare on us: the Chinese mainly in industrial espionage, and Russia in terms of propaganda and "ordinary" cyber crime. Unfortunately we didn't react on this, to the contrary we kept on doing deals with them - all while the few opposition in Russia and China got more and more silent or outright sent to the gulags.
It was our inaction that allowed Xi and Putin to be where they are today, and the cost of stopping both of them got incredibly large as a result, like it tends to happen with deferring problems to the future. Or to put it figuratively, we stood there like a boxing sack while Xi and Putin punched in on us.
Side note: The next one to watch on that front is India, IMHO - Modi has been going ever more authoritarian for years, has zero problem doing deals with Russia, and India is doing absolutely nothing to rein in their scam callcenters that steal billions of dollars a year, and yet we don't even take care to re-home at least parts of the pharmaceutical industry which is causing severe havoc as Europe, especially Germany, is dealing with a massive shortage of basic medicine.
you must think hn readers are astoundingly dumb
i mean, we are, but not that dumb
if you would like there to be no war, here are a couple of things you could try
- don't try to dictate where rulers of foreign countries get to be or to stop them from ruling their own countries
- don't exaggerate grievances like your industrial espionage nonsense
like, let's suppose there's someone today posting on weibo 'It was our inaction that allowed Biden to be where he is today, and the cost of stopping him got incredibly large as a result, like it tends to happen with deferring problems to the future.' in chinese
do you think that hypothetical post makes war more likely or less likely
I have zero tolerance for repressive dictatorships. Post 1945 (and partially even before that), the world agreed to at least some sort of basic human rights in peace and in war, but enforcement of that has been sorely lacking - which is what drives authoritarians in their spiral of escalation.
And we're seeing right now less than 1000km away from me sitting comfy and warm in Munich just where that leads to.
> don't exaggerate grievances like your industrial espionage nonsense
My grievances? What about the US government, who finally did wake up [1]?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/21/inside-chinas-spy-war-on-ame...
i mean we tried colonialism already, it makes things worse, not better
the us government has not declared war on china, fortunately
I would say all countries do this. Americans were caught spying even Angela Merkel, supposed to be a friend.
FWIW I think all countries with enough power do things like these.
so are government-backed espionage, government-backed hawkish propaganda, and government-backed crackers in countries such as the usa and germany
the usa also has a level of mass imprisonment that russia and china haven't seen in decades, it just isn't for political dissidence, except in a few cases like swartz and assange (who is currently imprisoned in the uk fighting extradition to the usa)
I would like to be able to have an idea to compare things in a fair way.
I do not mean you are wrong. I am just a person that believes what he sees. Not what others day they see. For this, real research is the best tool we have.
i agree that actually listing the evidence would be better, and i hope that if you make that effort you will post the list here
This is some dumb shit.
Even more amazing is US lawmakers continuing to try & shoot the US in the foot.
RISC-V is now globally developed, that ship has sailed. Same for products based on it. The US can't prevent its 'proliferation'. Only reduce the degree to which US entities are part of, and profit from that.
Are US lawmakers that dumb? (ok I guess that's a rhetorical question).
China learning from US contributions to Risc-v are not a good thing. However the obvious proposed solution wouldn't stop China from learning (it might delay them a few months, but they have plenty of smart engineers who can figure this out), and so will harm the US more.
2) - Mostly yes
3) - both
Which one of 3?
It's worth noting that China spends more money lobbying the US government than any other country on earth: https://www.opensecrets.org/fara/countries
I posted the numbers as a top level comment here [0], but the short version is that a lot of the signatories of this letter received (small) donations from Intel in the last election cycle.
My best guess is that Intel is actively lobbying against RISC-V using China as the boogeyman, and that these lawmakers were persuaded (sincerely or otherwise) to treat RISC-V as a threat.
If you think about how legislation does (and can) work, lawmakers, even if they were the most gifted people on the planet, obviously are not experts on everything. As a result they have to rely on others.
But who should those others be? When it comes to something like chip manufacturing, you’re down to essentially 1 major U.S. company in this area that can provide guidance.
One could argue they could go to academics, but a single academic is good for going deep into a specific area and not so good at cross concerns.
And bringing together all those people is effort.
On the other hand you have Intel that’s got scores of researchers, marketing experts, and lobbyists who are basically giving you high quality data and information for free.
Even without money and therefore outright corruption playing any role, companies like these have an outsized influence on lawmakers for absolutely practical reasons.
It's true that Intel has a lot of natural strengths for its lobbying efforts, but some representatives are going to be easier to persuade than others.
That there is zero overlap now does not mean it will stay that way, as Apple demonstrated so well.
So... how would hurting RISC-V, which helps ARM, be good for Intel? It's not. Pick a different boogeyman basically, Intel isn't the one here.
For Intel to ignore RISC-V right now would be to completely neglect the lessons of Apple Silicon. They appear to have waited until there was an actual product taking their market share before taking ARM seriously. I expect them to learn from that and not wait for a product this time.
Given the years of engineering effort involved in getting any of these projects to release, this definitely looks like an industry shift, not something driven by Apple.
Perhaps Intel's thinking here is that competition with ARM will drive innovation and cost-downs in that space, which will bleed 'up' and make their own competition's (mostly ARM) products even more competitive.
Multiple companies have M1-class RISC-V in the pipeline.
If ARM can scale up from cortex m-series to Apple M3 Pro Ultra Max… then why couldn’t RISC-V?
In point of fact, and I'll just say it again: this is dumb. Intel isn't remotely the most likely candidate here (again, my read is that on balance they'd love to see ARM competitors get some pressure on the other side). Trying to claim otherwise is just engaging in platform flamery nonsense. The logic doesn't work.
How is RISC-V threatening them exactly? They can (and should) switch to RISC-V.
Note NXP is already doing so[0], and that Atmel is part of Microchip[1].
0. https://www.nxp.com/company/about-nxp/leading-semiconductor-...
1. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/fpga...
These low-margin companies live and die on compatibility and integration. The reason you pick a STM32-whatever as your choice for your new product is generally at least partially because your existing staff know the tooling and your existing production people know the board integration requirements.
Swap that for some new RISC-V gadget and, well, you might win! Or you might find your customers walking across the street to buy someone else's gadget, because yours has no advantages.
Ergo, if you're STMicro, RISC-V is a threat in a way that "Oh, you should just use it yourself" doesn't address.
It's amusing, because I had deliberately elected to avoid mention of how STMicro is a RISC-V member[0].
>Or you might find your customers walking across the street to buy someone else's gadget, because yours has no advantages.
They will for sure should they not switch to the standard ISA. In their shoes, I wouldn't want to be left behind.
RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.
OK, no, that's just not true. Google "adoption curve". Saying that technology X is likely to win out eventually is not the same thing as saying there's no revenue to be had selling "legacy" technology Y. Even today people still fix bugs in the occasional COBOL gadget.
And if you're one of the companies (STMicro is one) selling at least partially "legacy" technology (they'd say "mature"), then anything that accelerates motion along that curve is a threat.
What are they going to about it?
RISC-V is inevitable.
It's actually simple: Embrace it or be left behind.
Note that, as highlighted in the parent, STMicro is a member of RISC-V. They're fortunately not that dumb.
Microcontrollers are, all things considered, not that much about the ISA itself, especially when we've gotten to 32-bit controllers big enough to program in C or higher-level languages.
People aren't reading the raw assembly and juggling registers themselves anymore. But they do care about the onboard peripherals, documentation, and tooling. The STM32 ecosystem is huge because they've nailed those things.
I could see a STM32Vxxx range, same basic design but drop a RISC-V core in, and new-dev projects will adopt it if it's got the same functionality bit is a nickel cheaper.
This isn't a FAANG office where everyone's an expert and people change tools weekly. Commercial firmware work for "boring" devices is extremely conservative, and there's a ton of money left to be made shipping junk that's merely "compatible".
If you have a firm that's committed to a frozen image of the platform on a specific date, they'll stick with existing products or modest riffs on it. The same premise is why we'll still see Z80 and 8051 derivatives until long past the heat death of the universe.
This is more about why a firm like STMicro doesn't need to freak out too much about RISC-V. There's no reason they 1) can't continue to sell ARM alongside RISC-V for the more change-averse audience and 2) leverage their established reputation in onboard-peripherals, toolchain, and documentation as their competitive edge.
Done right, this can be a real "commoditize your compliment" play: they can focus less effort on the boring "core CPU" functionality of their MCUs and divert it for the parts of the product they can offer a stronger case for.
You lost me. "That audience" is probably 80% of ST's market. If you're not talking about business as it exists then I don't know what your argument is about. It's certainly not responsive to the point I was making, which is that ST (and similar companies) is exposed to RISC-V as a business risk in a way that Intel is not.
Intel is also a member of RISC-V International: https://riscv.org/members/
I get that Intel is a very big company, but that kind of disconnect would be rather extreme.
> Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V
> A bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers in the US Congress have recently amplified a request to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce to place restrictions on Americans working with RISC-V (see also the initial request from the Senate) in order to prevent China from gaining dominance in CPU technology.
> The request is facially misguided; any restrictions would only serve to reduce American participation in an important emerging technology, while bolstering ARM’s position as an incumbent near-monopoly provider of embedded CPUs.
> When the first report came out, I hoped it was just a blip that would go away, but with the broader bi-partisan group asking for restrictions, I felt I could no longer just stand by and watch: I am an active participant in the RISC-V ecosystem. I’m also subject to US law.
> I did the one thing any American can do, which is write a letter summarizing my thoughts on the issue, and sending it to the White House, Department of Commerce, and the relevant members of Congress
Mike Gallagher: $6000
Marco Rubio: $2500
Haley Stevens: $2000
Carlos Gimenez: $5000
Darin LaHood: $7000
Andy Barr: $2000
Ashley Hinson: $10000
Total: $34500
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...
If a lobbyist connected to a donor requests a meeting, they get it, and if the lobbyist can then make a convincing enough case (preferably legally but sometimes otherwise) they can get action in their favor.
When you think of US politicians: think of the guy who owns the biggest used car dealership in Podunkville, Midwest.
That's your average US politician. Generally: the scummiest, griftiest jerk who happened to get lucky. Generally by inheritance as building the business takes too much energy to screw around with national politics. Not somebody smart. Not somebody moral. Think SBF but no education and knowledge whatsoever.
Is that person that cheap? Yah, sure, you betcha.
Doesn't negate their profit motive in having the world slow down RISC-V implementation but seems worth noting.
This is a problem the USA experienced (and was widely discussed) during the cold war. It's so discouraging to see this self-destructive approach being revived.
Why would it make sense to ban it in the US? They literally invented it.
Right now we’re having an anti-PRC moment. There are good and intelligent ways to have that moment, and there bad and stupid ways to have that moment. This is one of the latter, but Congress is a deliberative body within a free democracy so we’re going to see all of it.
r/TeslaInvestors and r/AMD_Stock are some of the worst. I can easily imagine some in the latter organizing to get RISC-V banned in the US.
The loser from RISC-V is clearly ARM because it's not nearly as hard to produce a low-power processor with mid-level performance, which is the core of ARM's market but RISC-V allows the vendors to avoid paying for the ARM license. And unlike x86, most existing ARM software isn't distributed as third party binaries tied to a particular architecture and could easily be recompiled for something else.
>neither of which RISC-V would do any time soon.
The latter, maybe.
The former, as soon as 2024 (e.g. Tenstorrent Ascalon)
But it would matter to ARM.
That makes the company's supporters intolerant of criticism because they've been conditioned to expect criticism to be in bad faith. Which continues even after the short sellers have given up or been eviscerated by margin calls.
SiFive launched a chinese subsidiary (StarFive) in
2017/2018. And they just announced they were giving
designs for some of their high-end cores to Sophgo (a
company out of Beijing.) My guess is US administrators
want SiFive to apply for export licenses before they do
this again.
I pretty much agree w/ Bunnie on this one. I lived
through the Crypto(graphy) Wars of 90s and still have
my "Sink Clipper" poster around here somewhere. If US
companies are trying to sell products and services
based on technology they can't export, but foreign
countries can easily replicate, the only thing you're
doing is making them (US tech companies) operate at a
disadvantage.
If we were worried about foreign tech dominance, then
maybe we could do what foreign countries do:
a. Develop a national industrial policy.
b. Pay for kids to get EE degrees. (or hell, pay for
kids to get business or art degrees.)
c. Subsidize the chip manufacturing sector the same
way we subsidize farmers or petroleum marketers.
d. Force Samsung and TSMC (both foreign countries) to
form joint ventures with US firms where US
countries own at least 51% of the JV.
Claiming they can close the Pandora's Box of
semiconductor manufacturing knowledge this late in the
game makes them (US Lawmakers) look incompetent. If
they wanted to "save US chip manufacturing" they should
have done something in the 1970s when TI was building
manufacturing plants in Malaysia and Thailand.This concern is less about the chips being made here, but controlling the ability for enemy powers to get a hold of them. Consider that "bombing the TSMC facilities" has been considered a possible plan if Taiwan is invaded, because a key goal is ensuring China doesn't control that capability.
Do you trade with the enemy? That's a traitor's domain. Or they're rather competitors you are not happy with and scared that they beat you at the game? Get off you butt and do something productive then.
Both can be true at the same time, e.g. Europe buying gas and oil from Russia. Realpolitik is often very messy to navigate, not made easier by the fact that we have collectively decided to tie our fates to Russia (for cheap energy) and China (for cheap production) and that decision is coming back home with a vengeance.
If you are looking for traitors, start with those who thought "change by trade" in the 90s/early 00s was a good idea - and check their paychecks. At least here in Germany, we know that disgraced former Chancellor Schröder is a Russian asset (literally, he got a high-paid job for Rosneft, most likely as a thank-you for pushing through Nord Stream), unfortunately he was clever enough to never implicate himself in a criminally chargeable manner.
by population it is
This just confirms that they were not enemies. Enemies want to exterminate each other. And trading with the official enemy is a crime last time I checked. I do not think Germany or Russia wanted that. They're neither friends nor enemies, both just looking how to exploit each other.
Plus depletion, which like depreciation reflects the value of an asset going down over time, making the company in question worth less than it would be otherwise, i.e. the book value is going down.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/budget...
The Janet-and-John bit is covered by Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biden-budget-targets...
"Calculating the cost of U.S. subsidies for the fossil fuel industry is complex because the incentives stretch across the U.S. tax code, but estimates range from $10 to $50 billion per year."
"U.S. oil and gas subsidies include provisions ranging from incentives for domestic production, write-offs and deductions tied to foreign production and income, and approved accounting methods that can reduce the stated taxable value of assets."
"One specific U.S. tax break on domestic production, for example, called intangible drilling costs, allows producers to deduct a majority of their costs from drilling new wells. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel of Congress, has estimated that eliminating it could generate $13 billion for the public coffers over 10 years."
"Another, the percentage depletion tax break, which allows independent producers to recover development costs of declining oil gas and coal reserves, could generate about $12.9 billion in revenue over 10 years, according to the panel."
Yes. We subsidize the Petro industry.
Anyway, the chain of who-started-it doesn't have a first link. There is no value-free way to assess it all..
However, there are a number of actions China could take against countries other than the US, where the US would either feel obligated to initiate war against China in response; or where US voters might demand the US go to war against China in response.
(And Chinese military analysts are very aware of all of these, drawing big red lines around these parts of strategy-space. Though they're also always re-measuring where these lines land — American public sentiment can waver such that today's "unforgivable" action might be tomorrow's "barely tolerable" action.)
There are also a number of actions China could take against its own citizens, that could "require" the initiation of war against them according to various treaties signed by the US, or even according to "international customary law."
Re: the Genocide Convention:
> Importantly, the Convention establishes on State Parties the obligation to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, including by enacting relevant legislation and punishing perpetrators, “whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals” (Article IV). That obligation, in addition to the prohibition not to commit genocide, have been considered as norms of international customary law and therefore, binding on all States, whether or not they have ratified the Genocide Convention.
(I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively committing genocide, historically has been, and continues to be, justification for the initiation of a world war where all previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop them from doing this.)
They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch vehicles and submarines, nobody is going to go to war with them over their own domestic crimes. A land war in Asia against a nuclear armed emerging superpower with a good percentage of the world’s population is practically suicidal.
International customary law only matter if you have the firepower to back it up.
Specifically, the goal from the Western perspective wouldn't be to "fight China" as one coherent entity, but rather specifically to erase the CCP from existence. A decapitation, of a head from a body that isn't a very big fan of that head.
This would be done presumably by:
1. trying to pump information and agent-provocateurs into China, to get China's own people on the same page the rest of the world is on that's making them want to go to war; to get the Chinese people to — at least partially — disavow the CCP as representing their interests. (Seems like this is already well on its way, and has been going on for about a decade now.)
2. having very precise information about where every key member of the CCP is at all times, both optically and packet-traffic-wise. And having some petite, precision, semi-ballistic, hypersonic missiles, to send to those places. Not from submarines, mind you. Nor from planes. From "somewhere else." Somewhere that probably sounds like stupid science fiction if someone without medals on their chest says it's already feasible and has been implemented for years now.
3. being friendly with the Taiwanese government, and having them ready and briefed to step in when a plug-and-play APT-delivered information campaign triggers that will see them installed them back as the "rightful government of China" — without any of them having to step foot off the safety of their island.
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A tangent about technology and doctrine:
Every war the US (and partners like Britain) has fought since WW2, every proxy war, every time they've given weapons to allies — the US has been not using its strategic arsenal for these things, in order to not show its hand to bigger enemies.
But China is the bigger enemy. No need to hide anything.
> They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch vehicles and submarines
So, okay, there's a thing you have to recognize that goes on in the world — the declassification treadmill. Technologies become public, stories become declassified, etc. at exactly the point where the government involved in their classification, no longer thinks that there's any competitive advantage in keeping the technology secret. This might be because their opponents now all also have the technology. But it's more-often the point where the government involved has moved on to bigger and better things.
We got a lot of declassification of nuclear technology and history back in the 1970s. (But going so far as to allow that history to be made into a major 2023 motion picture? Well, that's a taunt: basically making fun of your rivals for still thinking nukes pose any threat to you at all.)
The public — and not just the American public — got access to GPS in the 1980s. And to very precise GPS in the 2000s. Do you know what that means? It's a tacit statement that the US military doesn't consider GPS-guided [or BeiDou-guided] ICBMs a viable threat any more, either!
What does a threat look like? Well, it might be something both the US and China secretly have, and will both pull out and go to war with. Or it might be something only the US has. But from the US's posturing, it seems a lot like it's a thing — several things — that only the US has. A thing that China knows or at least suspects the US has, where having this thing is more than enough to entirely subdue China from taking certain aggressive foreign-policy positions.
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> nobody is going to go to war with them over their own domestic crimes
Well, no, of course that's not why anyone would actually bother. The Western goal is to pop China like a pinata and get all the candy that falls out. Not to invade/colonize, per se, but rather to interface directly with the Chinese people as a trading partner, without an insular and ethno-nationalist Chinese government setting the terms. To unplug the propaganda machine that makes Chinese tourists never bother to visit Western countries (except in insular, state-managed tour groups.)
A crime like genocide is just a defensible moral justification that everyone in the room in the UN could agree on, as a signal to get started on the project.
It's like if some awful billionaire who lives in your small town in his mansion with armed guards, one day killed his own wife, and everyone in town found out. From one perspective, it's "his family's internal business." But from another perspective, it's a defensible moral justification to everyone else in town finally forming a posse to storm his mansion, haul him out, do unspeakable things to him, and then auction off everything he owns! (Will his armed guards stop you? Maybe if he's still alive... but what if you could kill him at the very start? Maybe they'd admit they'd been waiting for you to do that for years, and they'll be glad to be off to a new job!)
And there's the flaw in your plan, if your orbital slaughterbot fantasy hits the wrong dead man's switch, half the world's population will be wiped out due to the fall out. There's a reason every single nuclear armed state still stands in some form. Nukes work, and intercepting hypersonic vehicles at scale is still tremendously difficult.
...as far as you know. Working purely from declassified information, which is all any of us have; but also in clear awareness of the clear forty-year gap between the frontier of declassified military secrets, and what would be the current classified state of the art.
> dead man's switch
I think you missed the part about, uh, the whole other half of how current doctrine works.
Do you know why having cyber supremacy is ranked above having space supremacy?
Because, if you have a sufficiently-good APT, you can have it press buttons! Buttons in places you'll never be able to get a spy inside at the right time! Buttons that subtly break all production missiles at the factory in ways undetectable until launch! Buttons that were meant to give civilian command oversight the emergency-override capability to cancel a pending launch of an insurrectionist military!
(Or, if you don't think that's plausible: "buttons" on a commander's personal cell phone, that calls a staff member of his and deepfakes their voice to tell the staffer to physically hit an air-gapped e-stop button. Add to the theatre by having the APT cut off Milnet-equivalent services at the time, so that a personal cellphone would be the obvious workaround.)
And of course, with previous APTs, you can also steal or more likely, create and plant all the blackmail material you want — to turn previously clean-and-trustworthy "keyholders", into your catspaws, willing to not turn the key when told. (Spies could do this too, but APTs can do it at scale.)
> There's a reason every single nuclear armed state still stands in some form.
Because none of them have yet stepped out of line enough for a major power who has anything "better than nukes" to see the point in showing their hand to their own much stronger opponents who have also moved on to playing this "better than nukes" poker game. (Nobody has had to show their hand at any point in the game so far. It's just been bluffing and folding. Nobody wants to be the first.)
For example, while North Korea has nukes, it has no answer to even basic 1990s-level orbital EMINT; and no functional Navy, let alone long-dive nuclear submarines to serve as untrackable launch platforms. All of NK's nuke launch sites are known — and so could be targeted for bombardment (with plain-old non-nuclear payloads!) in advance of launch, the moment they seem to be getting ready to shoot anyone.
The only reason it hasn't happened already, is that the action of taking the nuke sites out involves cards nobody wants to lay on the table until they have to. It's a move that weakens you, strategically. Although it's something that would almost certainly happen — many times over — the moment a hot war between larger players begins, once all those cards become destined to come out regardless.
What's the argument behind this? Yes, there are questions about the quality of polling data you can extract from the Chinese public, but the polls that do exist seem to show broad and wholehearted support and trust in the state.
I can see why: they addressed the core 'are you better off than your father was at this phase in his life' question for the vast majority of their population.
There's a real chance this backfires: you didn't throw off the hated tyrant, you assassinated a respected symbol of progress and prestige.
Maybe China's relatively modest global ambitions come from a conscious attempt to avoid a direct replay of the Cold War. From an idealistic perspective, one obvious lesson was that you can't reliably export philosophy; Soviet satellite states and American-propped-up democracies both became money pits and fell apart. So why not stick to things like Belt and Road, which provide you economic opportunity and soft power on a budget?
Only time will tell of course, but right now I'm cautious about China as they may be willing to bite their trade partners in the future.
Trade with China has always thought to be a democratising force, instead US has funded is country that is aggressively arming itself against it and becoming a threat to a civil rules based international order. Your 'no way' sounds pretty naive when the evidence points to China walking the path to exactly that. They have stated in not so many words that they will invade Taiwan, and walk right up to that line on a daily basis, and when that happens China will be at war with the US and the west generally.
OTOH, the US should be blamed, since we backed the communists past KMT to victory in the civil war... Play stupid games and so on.
It also makes RISC-V foreign just as the author complains that ARM is foreign.
I think placing restrictions on Americans working with PRC on RISC-V related stuff is a pretty reasonable thing to do.
I see this as short sighted anti China fear mongering but China is now at a point where is can invotate itself with out the help of "western" tech.
are you perhaps referring to some specific company in the RISC-V space? or are you actually saying "damn, foreign actors embraced an idea we originated, guess i've gotta flip positions and decide the idea of an open ISA is bad now"?