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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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