Alibaba Launches C930 RISC-V Chip Amid Shift from Western Tech
hpcwire.com
hpcwire.com
And very much welcome !
If it's available, snap it up. Buy it if it's for purchase. Download any available open source. Because I'm certain bans are incoming.
Worst case scenario you may borrow some compute power on some Hetzner cloud or similar :)
The article is a rather poor one though. There have been several T-HEAD (Alibaba's chip subsidiary) designs before this one. The key issue for supply-chain security is where they are manufactured, which is still TSMC unless something radical has changed in China.
Of course China might invade Taiwan or might develop their chip manufacturing capabilities (only a matter of time IMHO). That would be real news.
None of this has much to do with the RISC-V ISA which is just a common standard. The article would be equally fact-free FUD if this was using China's own LoongArch.
Can't they just "exfiltrate" or "compromise" or "steal" company secrets and establish their own base in mainland China ?
Genuinely curious as I know nothing of industrial espionage.
A cup of coffee dumped in the machinery would destroy most of it beyond all hope of repair, let alone something fragmentary and full of nitrogen bonds.
The only sanction you could perform would be "no chips for anyone, anywhere".
And in such a, uh, kinetic, situation, I'm absolutely sure neither side will allow the other to retain working facilities that don't undergo very unfortunate accidents. Even a sudden power cut can be devastating. A foil balloon was enough to take out multiple fabs in Germany, and Samsung dropped 3.5% of global flash supply on the floor from 30 minutes down.
MAD doesn't come only in nuclear flavor.
And I'd also bet that a translation of Simple Sabotage would be going viral within the week.
I didn't know about that incident; more details here:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wayward-balloon-c...
Moore law is losing steam. TSMC itself is probably just 10-20 years behind physical limits. A decade from now TSMC will run out of room to be much ahead anyway.
They certainly can’t “just” do that, no :-).
Source: see Intel, who have the money, experience, expertise, time, incentive and asml machines to do this and are making a big bet on gaining TSMC parity (at least). If the stock price is any indication, they are unlikely to succeed.
Disclaimer: I work at Intel but in an unrelated area. My information in this area is the same as an interested outsider. I do fiercely want them to succeed in becoming the only tsmc competitor.
This make it sounds like they will invade just because of TSMC, but it is more like using TSMC as an excuse if it really happen.
China wants Taiwan, TSMC or not.
It may not be surprising but it's not fact-free or non-news. The pace at which Alibaba is developing its RISC-V designs is significant. Removing one dependency on western supply chains is material development even if the dependency on TSMC remains.