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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: 2) by DannyB on Saturday May 21 2022, @12:22AM
Software lock-in is a powerful phenomena. IBM had figured this out by the 1960s.
Backward compatibility with an existing expensive collection of software is also a big draw.
Can I interest you in a new processor that will require you to re-purchase and re-write all of your expensive software?
Now with the rise of Linux, this problem began to disappear. Once the OS and compiler(s) are ported for other architectures, the huge software base tends to come along for a fairly low cost. But that was not true for much of computing history. Especially in the 1980s and prior.
Once IBM chose Intel x86 for their PC -- we were stuck with it for decades.
Now we are in the situation where the entire value proposition of both Windows and Intel x86 is nothing more than the compatibility with the existing software base. There are both better processors and better operating systems. Yet the WinTel duopoly will continue for some time just because of the tremendous need of backward compatibility with bass ackward systems.
Universal health care is so complex that only 32 of 33 developed nations have found a way to make it work.