Comment by xbmcuser

Comment by xbmcuser 13 hours ago

China will likely be the country taking forward RISC-V and ditching Arm and x86 completely. With USA trying to stop other countries from using latest Chinese tech they are given more reason to ditch any and all propitiatory US tech. So over the next decade I expect RISC-V architecture to enter and flood all Chinese tech devices from Tvs to cars and everything else that needs a CPU.

I personally hope China get's competitive in the node size as well as I want gpu and cpus start getting cheaper every generation again as once TSMC got big lead over Intel/Samsung and Nvidia got a big lead over AMD prices have stopped coming down generation to generation for CPU's and GPU's

ryao 12 hours ago

RISC-V is definitely gaining traction in China, but it does not have a monopoly on Chinese CPU core design:

  * Loongson is pushing a MIPS derivative forward.
  * Sugon is pushing a x86 derivative (originally derived from AMD Zen) forward
  * Zhaoxin is pushing a x86 derivative (derived from VIA’s chips) forward.

There was Shenwei with its Alpha processor derivative, but that effort has not had any announcements in years. However, there is still ARM China. Tianjin Phytium and HiSilicon continue to design ARM cores presumably under license from ARM China. There are probably others I missed.

There is also substantial RISC-V development outside of China. Some notable ones are:

  * SiFive - They are the first company to be in this space and are behind many of the early/current designs.
  * Tenstorrent - This company has Jim Keller and people formerly from Apple’s chip design team and others. They have high performance designs up to 8-wide.
  * Ventana - They claim to have a high performance core design that is 15-wide.
  * AheadComputing - they hired Intel’s Oregon design team to design high performance RISC-V cores after the Royal Core project was cancelled last year.
  * The Raspberry Pi foundation - their RP2350 contains Hazard3 RISC-V cores designed by one of their engineers.
  * Nvidia - They design RISC-V cores for the microcontrollers in their GPUs, of which the GPU System Processor is the most well known. They ship billions of RISC-V cores each year as part of their GPUs. This is despite using ARM for the high end CPUs that they sell to the community.
  * Western Digital - Like Nvidia, they design RISC-V cores for use in their products. They are particularly notable because they released the SweRV Core as open source.
  * Meta - They are making in-house RISC-V based chips for AI training/inference.

This is a short list. It would be relatively easy to assemble a list of dozens of companies designing RISC-V cores outside of China if one tried.

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xbmcuser 12 hours ago

USA has now started banning companies of other countries from using Chinese tech if the Chinese tech has US components its a big over reach but it will move Chinese tech companies to move away from any US propitiatory tech.
https://www.bis.gov/media/documents/general-prohibition-10-g...

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- ryao 12 hours ago
  
  That is not what your link says, but regardless of the details, Chinese companies are free to do whatever they want if they have no interest in exporting their products outside of China. Many do not care about markets outside of China. It is unlikely that China will drop all other ISAs in favor of RISC-V, especially since x86 and ARM are just as dominant in China as they are in other countries.
  
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  xbmcuser 11 hours ago
  
  But that is the thing China wants to move on to exporting high value items themselves instead of manufacturing it for others and letting them take most of the profits. The bans and stuff has just started but this will result in China moving towards RISC-V the same way export of latest node tech has resulted in China doing it themselves and rapidly catching up. If you read my original comment what I said was over the next decade China will move away from Arm and x86 for RISC-V. It takes years to plan and built devices 5-6 years from now we will find out what I am predicting comes true or not.
  
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  ryao 11 hours ago
  
  You should not reason about China as a monolithic entity. China has a population of 1.4 billion people. Some look outward while others look inward. Those looking outward are interested in RISC-V for certain things since it is not subject to U.S. export controls (so far).
  China is unlikely to move away from x86 and ARM internally even in a 10 year span. The only way that would happen is if RISC-V convinces the rest of the world to move away from those architectures in such a short span of time. ISA lock-in from legacy software is a deterrent for migration in China just as much as it is in any other country.
  By the way, RISC-V is considered a foreign ISA in China, while the MIPS-derived LoongArch is considered (or at least marketed as) a domestic ISA. If the Chinese make a push to use domestic technology, RISC-V would be at a disadvantage, unless it is rebranded like MIPS was.
  
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bobmcnamara 11 hours ago

They've already exfiltrated Arm's IP and began designing their own Arm cores. Is there a need for them to switch?

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