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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 maxwell demon on Friday May 20 2022, @12:15PM (2 children)
Software can be reverse-engineered. Or simply used without license. Yes, US companies would complain, but why would China care if the US complains about chips that are both manufactured and sold inside China?
IP is worthless without some way to enforce it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @12:35PM
Had Mr Trump won a second term and nvidia acquired ARM, China had serious concerns.
Neither of those things happened but they saw what the USA did to shut Huawei and ZTE out of international markets due to sanctions.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Friday May 20 2022, @05:45PM
Amongst other things they are obviously considering revenue from exports.