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from the dont-put-some-of-your-eggs-in-too-many-baskets dept.
A growing number of Chinese chip design firms have adopted open-source RISC-V in their chip designs as an alternative to Intel's proprietary X86 and Arm's architecture, in a bid to minimise potential damage from US sanctions and to save on licensing fees.
[....] "[This] gives Chinese companies access to a global open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) ecosystem," said Stewart Randall, head of electronics and embedded software at consultancy Intralink. "So Chinese companies can have access to, and create, their own cores or chips based on it."
However, some industry experts said China's adoption of open-source RISC-V architecture would not shield them from all US sanction risks, as America still holds the trump card when it comes to electronic design automation (EDA) tools, the key software needed for chip design, as well as chip manufacturing technologies.
If you really want to create your own cores from scratch, without licensing anyone else's IP, is it truly possible to do so with RISC-V?
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday May 20 2022, @12:05PM (4 children)
In India, RISC-V is already a national computing platform officially.
https://shakti.org.in/processors.html [shakti.org.in]
A great step of an ancient civilization to digital sovereignty.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @01:22PM
India only became an independent country ruled by Indians in 1947.
I know you said "civilization" instead of country, but even that is not quite true, as the culture, laws, and political unity of ethnic groups is wildly different from the old civilizations of the subcontinent. (There was not just one!) Much of modern India is due to the British and not ancient India.
It is true that much of Indian culture goes back many centuries, but some people lose sight that India is a VERY young country still working out how to be a nation.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday May 20 2022, @01:25PM (2 children)
Are any of those actually available as silicon yet or are they all still FPGA soft-cores? The last time I looked they were even more preliminary than the Chinese-sourced ones.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday May 20 2022, @03:34PM (1 child)
In media I observed several tape-outs and user manuals available for some development boards. Though it's hard to obtain anything outside India.
India is big. And generally behind China in all electronics. The platform itself is mandatory government standard. Education, academy, small businesses, industry, military, everyone needs and will need many of these. Fabrication is still limited, growing. Any local production stays in India and will stay there for years, for sure.
I would not even buy any single board of that smuggled out just now, because I understand that would deprive some Indian child of important educative experience for lifetime. In compare to that, Chinese RISC-V dev kits are already a commodity.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 21 2022, @03:17AM
If as you say, every board bought is taken from someone else, then they're a dead end. For most mass produced goods if you buy more, they make more. Electronics should scale well to higher production. If it can't answer higher demand with higher supply, then there's probably something wrong with the product or the producer.
Perhaps the producers' business models are milking some government subsidy rather than producing products? If the subsidy doesn't increase with volume, and the product loses money without the subsidy, then they have no reason to make more.