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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 22 2022, @05:38PM
this is a feeling, since i am no chip designer, but the CISC legacy of intel was prolly influenced by the biggest enabler *cough*m$*cough* which needed a cpu that was a "caset player" for windows software.
so, like a win-cpu, not a fast, lean, smart cpu design where other OS software could make use of it.
again, i have a feeling that cpu designers at intel sighed a breath of relief when linux came on to the scene and a chance to remove the cruft and add some risc?
no linux happend, we'd prolly have >20 long CISC instruction sets gear for .NET intel chips.