[GTALUG] "RISC-V technology emerges as battleground in US-China tech war"

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 2:32 PM Alvin Starr via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

>
> > It is true that ARM's ownership has allowed the US government to make
> > things very difficult for Huawei.  No wonder China likes RISC-V.



> I would be willing to bet the various law makers are taking advice from
> Arm, Intel and AMD.
>
> Think back to the days of proprietary Operating Systems.
> The main vendors were all going on about the evils of open source linux.


I think there's something very different at play here. While I'm sure
existing chipmakers are whispering in Congress' ear, they don't have any
selling to do. Since the US has already put export controls on advanced
chipmaking technology and equipment in China, RISC-V can be trivially
advanced as a path to circumvent such controls. It's no secret that the HQ
of the RISC-V consortium was moved from the US to Switzerland explicitly to
inhibit any one country (or bloc of countries) from inhibiting its progress.

As you said, being open source hardware design it's available to all. That
applies to China but also other countries under tech embargoes, as well as
emerging economies like India that would also like to play in this field.
The US and its allies can easily see chip-design superiority as a national
security issue, and indeed they might prohibit their own nationals from
participating and especially contributing IP. But they can't stop other
countries from contributing, and it will be interesting to see if China --
with all its tech universities and foreign-college graduates -- is as able
to fill that vacuum, along with other countries disliking Western controls.

It is notable that, given that RISC-V tech is distributed under an
Apache-like license, even the US&allies chipmakers are able to take any
existing RISC-V tech and incorporate it into their own proprietary
components. So they could build upon any Chinese-contributed innovation
without having to give back. You don't need to even acknowledge the use of
RISC-V in your own tech unless you want their logo.

But this is only one part of the puzzle. The RISC-V consortium, like ARM,
does not make chips but only chip designs. Once a spec is out you still
need a Qualcomm able to turn it into silicon. Most advanced chipmaking
hardware is also embargoed to China by the US, Taiwan, Japan, the
Netherlands and others, so even if a sufficiently-advanced RISC-V design is
created it will still be a challenge for an embargoed country to produce
them. And China has had only limited success in making advanced chips for,
say, post-embargo Huawei phones.

The deep global-geopolitics component of this issue renders it far
different IMO from Microsoft's anti-Linux campaigns, That was purely
commercially driven. Back then open source wasn't well-known, and you could
still spread FUD about it. We're decades past that now, and many of FOSS'
old worst enemies are at best friends and at worst respectful competitors.

Open source as a term is (generally) well understood and has spread to open
source hardware, open source intelligence, and of course hardware. The
players are different and the messages are different. Nobody is claiming
anymore that open source produces inferior products; indeed, the proposed
actions against RISC-V imply that its development model is seen as capable
of producing something sufficiently advanced to pose an international
security threat.

- Evan
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