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Being able to block ARM reference designs from Huawei's HiSilicon and other fabless Chinese semiconductor firms like Rockchip and Allwinner has a huge impact on

Being able to block ARM reference designs from Huawei's HiSilicon and other fabless Chinese semiconductor firms like Rockchip and Allwinner has a huge impact on the United States' ability to block China's technological ambitions. Right now I'm not interesting in having a debate about whether or not that's a good thing, but it would be good to have a realistic and sober discussion about the impact on this acquisition on China's technological ambitions. There have been recent reports that China's leading semiconductor firm (called SMIC) will be added to the Entity List, which will blocks its access to western technology. If true, this effectively scuttles China's attempts to compete with Taiwan's TSMC and reach semiconductor fabrication parity. SMIC's ambitions heavily rely on freely accessing US-aligned technology: specifically lithography equipment from the Netherlands-based ASML and engineers poached from Taiwan's world-leading semiconductor manufacturing firms. On the x86 front, when AMD was desperate for cash a few years ago they setup joint ventures with China (THATIC and Hygon) and were transferring AMD's then current-generation Zen 1 architecture to China. Further transfer has also been blocked via the Entity List. It's also worth noting that AMD is in a much better financial position after the success of their Ryzen product line, so has less need to make difficult trade-offs by transferring their current-generation technology in exchange for short-term cash injections, so it seems very unlikely they will applying for an export license. At this point, if I was China, I would invest heavily in RISC-V based cores, and openly release highly competitive designs.

roenxi 6y ago
It'll be a real test of China as we watch how this tech blockade plays out. 60s China would starve all the peasants to make a point. If 2020 China manages to avoid that rookie blunder, it is difficult to see how the knowledge transfer will be stopped. The US is reliant on bullying to make this work - that is not a strategically dominant position, to say the least. Particularly looking at the Soviets, it is remarkable how often the US's serious adversaries in the last century choose to disembowel themselves. It is a great game to see which government fails beyond recovery first.
- jsjohnst 6y ago
  > It is a great game to see which government fails beyond recovery first. The scary thing is, it might be the US next.
  - zouhair 6y ago
    Another 4 years of Trump will clinch it.
    - blackrock 6y ago
      What about another 20 years of Trump? He will probably seek to abolish the term limits.
    - coolspot 6y ago
      Biden seems to be friendly with China though, which would be a mistake.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Sounds like wishful thinking. Trump didn't exactly harm the US economically in his first term up until lockdown, but many other countries have "disembowelled" themselves worse over that. Nor did he commit the US to expensive foreign wars. In fact his primary foreign policy objective was to change the consensus on China, which he appears to have managed without spending a penny. Trade war/cold war with China is now firmly on the global agenda, whereas 4 years ago it wasn't. Even his opponents talk about which parts of his trade barriers to keep vs whether to scrap them entirely.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Well tech blockade either works or don't work, depending on whether the country has enough resources to completely invent an entire indigenous replacement. Does China have enough resource? Remain to be seen but odds are slightly in the yes direction.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
In the short term it slightly reinforces the US's hand. I say 'slightly' because in fact the US already have power over ARM. But longer term it creates a trend in which Armerican companies themselves will struggle in China. So what? Well, China will overtake the US so ultimately the US will have a disadvantage in the world's top market. Edit: That's a key issue with the US's strategy with China, which seems to be focused on the short term (One might argue that they did the same mistake in Iraq in Afghanistan...) The point is that relations with China are a long game and China certainly plays a long game. The US need a long term plan and to accept that they cannot keep the top spot indefinitely.
- someperson 6y ago
  I was hoping for a technology-focused discussion here, but I'll point out that China is at or near it's 21st century peak in terms of relative world power. China is facing a massive demographic cliff (due to 35 years of the One Child Policy). It's been predicted for decades that "China will grow old before it gets rich" and it's way too late to change. From the 2030s onwards, China faces a massive elderly population and dwindling workforce. The United States has favorable demographics for the next few decades and will certainly be able to keep parity with China. Admittedly the US has started developing issues around demographics (falling fertility rate, and falling immigration), but it's not as dire as China current situation.
  - barkingcat 6y ago
    When it comes to population control and China, there's no such thing as "it's way too late to change." China can enforce mandatory population growth easily enough (anyone wanting a marriage license must produce a child within 6 months, if not, the marriage is annulled), and if that is on the 10-15 year time horizon, they can easily allow cloning technology be used on humans for the short term.
    - pmontra 6y ago
      > anyone wanting a marriage license must produce a child within 6 months So they start 3 months in advance? /s Whatever, I think it's much easier to limit the number of children than to enforce a minimum. Both can be very unwelcomed for many reasons I don't want to get into, but not everybody can have children.
pantalaimon 6y ago
> On the x86 front, when AMD was desperate for cash a few years ago they setup joint ventures with China (THATIC and Hygon) and were transferring AMD's then current-generation Zen 1 architecture to China. That's not even the whole truth. The version of Zen 1 they exported had to be nerfed in several ways in order to be given the OK for export. Performance is much worse than comparable Zen 1 CPUs. See https://www.anandtech.com/show/15493/hygon-dhyana-reviewed-chinese-x86-cpus-amd https://www.anandtech.com/show/15493/hygon-dhyana-reviewed-c...
bakuninsbart 6y ago
There is an ongoing fight between ARM China and ARM HQ, and the CEO of ARM China simply refused to accept her dismissal. [1] I guess this is a political point (and I'm sorry), but it might be that ARM China simply refuses to acknowledge US sanctions in the future. > At this point, if I was China, I would invest heavily in RISC-V based cores, and openly release highly competitive designs. That's actually exactly what they are doing![2] Alibaba claims to have developed the most powerful RISC-V processor up to date [3] and Huawei has long been rumoured to be working on their own design. [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Arm-China-asks-Beijing-to-intervene-in-row-with-UK-parent https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Arm-China-asks-B... [2] https://cntechpost.com/2020/07/25/risc-v-processor-designed-by-five-chinese-university-students-successfully-tape-out/ https://cntechpost.com/2020/07/25/risc-v-processor-designed-... [3] https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/08/21/alibaba-on-the-bleeding-edge-of-risc-v-with-xt910/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/08/21/alibaba-on-the-bleed...
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  It never occurred to me that a division of a company could just... secede from the parent company. What could the parent company even do if something like this occurred across less-then-friendly national boundaries? Could the parent company sue to force the errant division to close? In what court? It's bizarre that it's not more common...
  - riffraff 6y ago
    it's even more bizarre: Wu controls Arm China because he's physically in control of a seal that gives him power to sign documents with the company authority[0]. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/main-street-doesn-t-want-weird-loans https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/main-s... look for "Who controls a company?"
    - jsjohnst 6y ago
      This is so comical and yet so expected when you give arbitrary importance to things like that.
throwaway4good 6y ago
RISC-V is dominated by American companies. They could be a part of sanctions as well. I think the Chinese will continue with ARM short term and then create a Chinese-dominated alternative. From an operating systems point of view I would go for an intermediate language (similar to .NET or Java bytecode) that I also could do some on-the-fly verification of and only have very little compiled for the actual cpu (at least beyond dedicated embedded systems). Being forced to redo the full stack from processors to end-user OS and cloud services gives a possibility to let go of a lot legacy and pursue some ideas that have been "cutting-edge research" in CS for years.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  Combining the ideas here: https://consumer.huawei.com/en/press/news/2019/huawei-launches-harmonyos/ https://consumer.huawei.com/en/press/news/2019/huawei-launch... With say: https://webassembly.org https://webassembly.org And the actual instruction set of the CPU doesn't matter that much.
- nix23 6y ago
  >RISC-V is dominated by American companies. Really? Have a look at the Premier members: https://riscv.org/ https://riscv.org/
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    Ok, maybe not quite fair but the point is that they risk the same sanctions as for ARM.
    - nix23 6y ago
      >RISC-V International is a global nonprofit association based in Switzerland. Founded in 2015 as the RISC-V Foundation with 29 members, RISC-V is now a truly global organization with over 200 member organizations in more than 30 countries, plus over 300 individual members worldwide. It's not based in the US, and its under the BSD License.
fxtentacle 6y ago
I don't think they can block China from using ARM cores. They can sue or try to make it illegal to import the resulting products into the US, but I'm not sure how well that will work. But in any case, I'm 100% sure that someone somewhere in China has a copy of the current ARM designs, so they will be able to continue to produce them for their domestic market no matter what happens. Yes, that might make their products counterfeit ARM cores. But I'm not sure anyone will actually care.
- kome 6y ago
  More likely this will create another HarmonyOS moment, where Huawei had to come up with a replacement for Android. Chinese industry and government will start to invest heavily on a homemade CPU architecture. And just by the force of the sheer numbers of their internal market + strict protectionism, they can succeed.
  - onepointsixC 6y ago
    They can succeed in the internal market using the same government assistance and non market forces they always have. The question is the global market and will the Chinese firewall seal them inside.
    - blackrock 6y ago
      The global market needs China, in order to be profitable, and to succeed. I wonder if China will say that the manufacturing of all ARM devices in China will be illegal. Then those companies will scramble to shift their manufacturing out of China, thereby increasing their own costs for everyone, then bankrupting themselves in the process.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        Eh, the global market succeeded and was profitable back when China was almost entirely sealed off from the world. The global internet market succeeds and is wildly profitable despite being mostly locked out of China by the firewall. I wonder if China will say that the manufacturing of all ARM devices in China will be illegal. CPUs aren't manufactured in China to begin with. Ditto for many other of the complex components of electronic devices. China handles final assembly and the parts that are easier to make. If you're proposing China forbidding the manufacture of any electronic device that contains an ARM core anywhere physically inside it, sure, they could do that. They'd gut their own economy and risk an uprising given how much their "legitimacy" relies on economic success. Assembly of electronic devices is easily moved around, some of it is already moving to cheaper places like Vietnam simply because Chinese labour has been getting more expensive over time as the country develops. Which is cheaper: packing up and relocating a factory to a country with lower labour costs and a significantly less aggressive government, OR, redesigning your entire product and (for phones/TVs) breaking compatibility with huge numbers of your apps to strip out ARM in favour of something significantly less performant? Moving the factories will always win that comparison.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jordiburgos 6y ago
What can you accomplish wirh RISC-V that can't be done with ARM or x86? Are there any other benefits?
- nine_k 6y ago
  Unrestricted imports into the US? No way to sanction that based on patents?
  - FullyFunctional 6y ago
    + freedom to make your own extensions + $0 license fees. The list goes on.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Well, for one, China is not interested in keeping ARM around so using ARM would be a pretty poor choice.
imtringued 6y ago
This is an opportunity for China to come out ahead. Nvidia just imploded one of the most entrenched ISAs and leveled the playing field to newcomers. From a Chinese perspective the worst thing that could have happened is that ARM dominates mobile, desktop, servers and embedded. ARM was rock solid before the Nvidia acquisition. Now it's on shaky ground.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
IMO it doesn't really matter which design they chose. They already have mips-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson with hardware-assisted X86-translation (And ARM too? That was news to me.) Which seems to be OK for the process technology they used.

roenxi 6y ago

It'll be a real test of China as we watch how this tech blockade plays out. 60s China would starve all the peasants to make a point. If 2020 China manages to avoid that rookie blunder, it is difficult to see how the knowledge transfer will be stopped. The US is reliant on bullying to make this work - that is not a strategically dominant position, to say the least. Particularly looking at the Soviets, it is remarkable how often the US's serious adversaries in the last century choose to disembowel themselves. It is a great game to see which government fails beyond recovery first.

jsjohnst 6y ago
> It is a great game to see which government fails beyond recovery first. The scary thing is, it might be the US next.
- zouhair 6y ago
  Another 4 years of Trump will clinch it.
  - blackrock 6y ago
    What about another 20 years of Trump? He will probably seek to abolish the term limits.
  - coolspot 6y ago
    Biden seems to be friendly with China though, which would be a mistake.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Sounds like wishful thinking. Trump didn't exactly harm the US economically in his first term up until lockdown, but many other countries have "disembowelled" themselves worse over that. Nor did he commit the US to expensive foreign wars. In fact his primary foreign policy objective was to change the consensus on China, which he appears to have managed without spending a penny. Trade war/cold war with China is now firmly on the global agenda, whereas 4 years ago it wasn't. Even his opponents talk about which parts of his trade barriers to keep vs whether to scrap them entirely.
Aperocky 6y ago
Well tech blockade either works or don't work, depending on whether the country has enough resources to completely invent an entire indigenous replacement. Does China have enough resource? Remain to be seen but odds are slightly in the yes direction.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

In the short term it slightly reinforces the US's hand. I say 'slightly' because in fact the US already have power over ARM. But longer term it creates a trend in which Armerican companies themselves will struggle in China. So what? Well, China will overtake the US so ultimately the US will have a disadvantage in the world's top market. Edit: That's a key issue with the US's strategy with China, which seems to be focused on the short term (One might argue that they did the same mistake in Iraq in Afghanistan...) The point is that relations with China are a long game and China certainly plays a long game. The US need a long term plan and to accept that they cannot keep the top spot indefinitely.

someperson 6y ago
I was hoping for a technology-focused discussion here, but I'll point out that China is at or near it's 21st century peak in terms of relative world power. China is facing a massive demographic cliff (due to 35 years of the One Child Policy). It's been predicted for decades that "China will grow old before it gets rich" and it's way too late to change. From the 2030s onwards, China faces a massive elderly population and dwindling workforce. The United States has favorable demographics for the next few decades and will certainly be able to keep parity with China. Admittedly the US has started developing issues around demographics (falling fertility rate, and falling immigration), but it's not as dire as China current situation.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  When it comes to population control and China, there's no such thing as "it's way too late to change." China can enforce mandatory population growth easily enough (anyone wanting a marriage license must produce a child within 6 months, if not, the marriage is annulled), and if that is on the 10-15 year time horizon, they can easily allow cloning technology be used on humans for the short term.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    > anyone wanting a marriage license must produce a child within 6 months So they start 3 months in advance? /s Whatever, I think it's much easier to limit the number of children than to enforce a minimum. Both can be very unwelcomed for many reasons I don't want to get into, but not everybody can have children.

pantalaimon 6y ago

> On the x86 front, when AMD was desperate for cash a few years ago they setup joint ventures with China (THATIC and Hygon) and were transferring AMD's then current-generation Zen 1 architecture to China. That's not even the whole truth. The version of Zen 1 they exported had to be nerfed in several ways in order to be given the OK for export. Performance is much worse than comparable Zen 1 CPUs. See https://www.anandtech.com/show/15493/hygon-dhyana-reviewed-chinese-x86-cpus-amd https://www.anandtech.com/show/15493/hygon-dhyana-reviewed-c...

bakuninsbart 6y ago

There is an ongoing fight between ARM China and ARM HQ, and the CEO of ARM China simply refused to accept her dismissal. [1] I guess this is a political point (and I'm sorry), but it might be that ARM China simply refuses to acknowledge US sanctions in the future. > At this point, if I was China, I would invest heavily in RISC-V based cores, and openly release highly competitive designs. That's actually exactly what they are doing![2] Alibaba claims to have developed the most powerful RISC-V processor up to date [3] and Huawei has long been rumoured to be working on their own design. [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Arm-China-asks-Beijing-to-intervene-in-row-with-UK-parent https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Arm-China-asks-B... [2] https://cntechpost.com/2020/07/25/risc-v-processor-designed-by-five-chinese-university-students-successfully-tape-out/ https://cntechpost.com/2020/07/25/risc-v-processor-designed-... [3] https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/08/21/alibaba-on-the-bleeding-edge-of-risc-v-with-xt910/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/08/21/alibaba-on-the-bleed...

jiggawatts 6y ago
It never occurred to me that a division of a company could just... secede from the parent company. What could the parent company even do if something like this occurred across less-then-friendly national boundaries? Could the parent company sue to force the errant division to close? In what court? It's bizarre that it's not more common...
- riffraff 6y ago
  it's even more bizarre: Wu controls Arm China because he's physically in control of a seal that gives him power to sign documents with the company authority[0]. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/main-street-doesn-t-want-weird-loans https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/main-s... look for "Who controls a company?"
  - jsjohnst 6y ago
    This is so comical and yet so expected when you give arbitrary importance to things like that.

throwaway4good 6y ago

RISC-V is dominated by American companies. They could be a part of sanctions as well. I think the Chinese will continue with ARM short term and then create a Chinese-dominated alternative. From an operating systems point of view I would go for an intermediate language (similar to .NET or Java bytecode) that I also could do some on-the-fly verification of and only have very little compiled for the actual cpu (at least beyond dedicated embedded systems). Being forced to redo the full stack from processors to end-user OS and cloud services gives a possibility to let go of a lot legacy and pursue some ideas that have been "cutting-edge research" in CS for years.

throwaway4good 6y ago
Combining the ideas here: https://consumer.huawei.com/en/press/news/2019/huawei-launches-harmonyos/ https://consumer.huawei.com/en/press/news/2019/huawei-launch... With say: https://webassembly.org https://webassembly.org And the actual instruction set of the CPU doesn't matter that much.
nix23 6y ago
>RISC-V is dominated by American companies. Really? Have a look at the Premier members: https://riscv.org/ https://riscv.org/
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  Ok, maybe not quite fair but the point is that they risk the same sanctions as for ARM.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >RISC-V International is a global nonprofit association based in Switzerland. Founded in 2015 as the RISC-V Foundation with 29 members, RISC-V is now a truly global organization with over 200 member organizations in more than 30 countries, plus over 300 individual members worldwide. It's not based in the US, and its under the BSD License.

fxtentacle 6y ago

I don't think they can block China from using ARM cores. They can sue or try to make it illegal to import the resulting products into the US, but I'm not sure how well that will work. But in any case, I'm 100% sure that someone somewhere in China has a copy of the current ARM designs, so they will be able to continue to produce them for their domestic market no matter what happens. Yes, that might make their products counterfeit ARM cores. But I'm not sure anyone will actually care.

kome 6y ago
More likely this will create another HarmonyOS moment, where Huawei had to come up with a replacement for Android. Chinese industry and government will start to invest heavily on a homemade CPU architecture. And just by the force of the sheer numbers of their internal market + strict protectionism, they can succeed.
- onepointsixC 6y ago
  They can succeed in the internal market using the same government assistance and non market forces they always have. The question is the global market and will the Chinese firewall seal them inside.
  - blackrock 6y ago
    The global market needs China, in order to be profitable, and to succeed. I wonder if China will say that the manufacturing of all ARM devices in China will be illegal. Then those companies will scramble to shift their manufacturing out of China, thereby increasing their own costs for everyone, then bankrupting themselves in the process.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Eh, the global market succeeded and was profitable back when China was almost entirely sealed off from the world. The global internet market succeeds and is wildly profitable despite being mostly locked out of China by the firewall. I wonder if China will say that the manufacturing of all ARM devices in China will be illegal. CPUs aren't manufactured in China to begin with. Ditto for many other of the complex components of electronic devices. China handles final assembly and the parts that are easier to make. If you're proposing China forbidding the manufacture of any electronic device that contains an ARM core anywhere physically inside it, sure, they could do that. They'd gut their own economy and risk an uprising given how much their "legitimacy" relies on economic success. Assembly of electronic devices is easily moved around, some of it is already moving to cheaper places like Vietnam simply because Chinese labour has been getting more expensive over time as the country develops. Which is cheaper: packing up and relocating a factory to a country with lower labour costs and a significantly less aggressive government, OR, redesigning your entire product and (for phones/TVs) breaking compatibility with huge numbers of your apps to strip out ARM in favour of something significantly less performant? Moving the factories will always win that comparison.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jordiburgos 6y ago

What can you accomplish wirh RISC-V that can't be done with ARM or x86? Are there any other benefits?

nine_k 6y ago
Unrestricted imports into the US? No way to sanction that based on patents?
- FullyFunctional 6y ago
  + freedom to make your own extensions + $0 license fees. The list goes on.
imtringued 6y ago
Well, for one, China is not interested in keeping ARM around so using ARM would be a pretty poor choice.

imtringued 6y ago

This is an opportunity for China to come out ahead. Nvidia just imploded one of the most entrenched ISAs and leveled the playing field to newcomers. From a Chinese perspective the worst thing that could have happened is that ARM dominates mobile, desktop, servers and embedded. ARM was rock solid before the Nvidia acquisition. Now it's on shaky ground.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

IMO it doesn't really matter which design they chose. They already have mips-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson with hardware-assisted X86-translation (And ARM too? That was news to me.) Which seems to be OK for the process technology they used.