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> The result is that Chinese tech companies are rallying around RISC-V as the future chip architecture. That’s really the motivation here. I guess google is tr

> The result is that Chinese tech companies are rallying around RISC-V as the future chip architecture. That’s really the motivation here. I guess google is trying to stay ahead of being replaced in China? To me, as a westerner, I‘d rather see ARM succeed than RISC-V. Despite ironically being designed in the west, rallying the world around an open instruction set I believe will primarily benefit China, who wants to lead in semiconductors. It gives them the ability to become big players without having to push a new ISA on the world, and if it becomes dominant on mobile, they could see themselves replacing Qualcomm, Intel etc. It is a zero sum game all around.

snvzz 4y ago
If the west does not adopt RISC-V, then it will simply fall behind China. I don't think this is something we want.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  That assumes that RISC-V is a competitive advantage over ARM and x86. While I have no particular grounds for pessimism about RISC-V, it seems a bit premature to assume that it's better in practice than those others.
  - photonbeam 4y ago
    riscv does have something that arm/x86 doesn't have: intense implementation competition at every perf/price point Lots of companies are throwing their hat in trying to design a riscv core. You can do a riscv startup, its much harder to do an arm startup and near impossible to do an x86 one
    - stonogo 4y ago
      I've been hearing about how RISC-V is going to crush the market for over a decade, and the only fully-functional RISC-V-based product on the market is a soldering iron. Everything else is some kind of DIY proof of concept kit of no use to any actual consumer or business. The architecture has about fifteen or twenty years before they are any kind of meaningful threat to x86_64, assuming it lasts that long.
      - amaranth 4y ago
        There is a chance you're using RISC-V CPUs right now. Nvidia GPUs use them for their management logic (GSP) and Seagate/Western Digital are using them for HDD controllers. ARM used to only be used in these kinds of workloads too, you have to work your way up the stack.
      - FullyFunctional 4y ago
        Since RISC-V is barely ten years old that's quite a statement. Introducing a new instruction set is an enormous undertaking, taking multi-decades typically. If anything, the adoption of RISC-V and its momentum is astonishingly fast.
        stonogo 4y ago
        They had hardware in 2011. Development preceded that milestone by some years at Berkeley, which is where I was first told about its impending market domination.
- talideon 4y ago
  China has spent ages trying to get their local MIPS derivatives to a place where they're competitive, but haven't succeeded. Adopting or not adopting RISC-V (which is only an ISA, not an actual platform) won't make a lick of difference.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Dalewyn 4y ago
The flip side is that China is pushing RISC-V because they can't develop their own homegrown microarchitecture. This is China we're talking about here, they aren't rallying behind RISC-V because they like it. It's because they can't develop anything better than RISC-V, can't license x86 or ARM (which clearly are better than RISC-V) for obvious reasons, and so they're stuck with what they can get their grubby hands on. If the west widely supports and adopts RISC-V in a way that doesn't exclude China, we are quite literally just playing into Chinese hands like the west has done time and time again. Nurturing RISC-V in itself is a noble endeavour, but we must do so in a manner that doesn't hoist our own god damn petards.
- rfoo 4y ago
  Then why Chinese (if they can be treated as a whole) don't just rally LoongArch?
- throwaway4good 4y ago
  This is just incorrect. Chinese companies have plenty of design chops.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    And what percentage does that involve stealing and reverse engineering IP from western countries?
    - snvzz 4y ago
      Try and see if you can find any stolen code here[0] or here[1]. Cheers. 0. https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc906 https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc906 1. https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910 https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910
      - lloydatkinson 4y ago
        No idea what this is or why its relevant. Do your two repositories represent the entire of industry in China? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-in-intellectual-property-from-about-30-multinational-companies/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-... "Cheers."
arlort 4y ago
I (also westerner) would still like to see RISC-V succeed, doesn't mean ARM has to fail but open competition is likely to be good in the long term. An ISA won't let China become a leader in semiconductor unless they implement it better than both western implementations of RISC-V and than ARM/Intel, the only thing it does is give an incentive to not rest on our laurels I am also fundamentally uneasy about fundamental technologies being based on just a handful of companies, whether they are western or not, I know it happens but the less it happens the better imo
c_yh 4y ago
Envy that you can become a member of Westerners.
throwaway4good 4y ago
“ It is a zero sum game all around.” It is not. We consumers benefit from competition, and loose from higher prices and poorer products produced by monopolies.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > We consumers benefit from competition Look where the "competition" of the last 30 years brought the Western world: domestic electronics production is all but dead outside of military and R&D depending on quick turnaround because it got moved off to China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea, domestic pharmaceutics and chemical production is all but dead because India and China are absurdly cheaper, domestic steel production has taken serious hits for the same reason, animal welfare in farming is all but gone with farmers preventively feeding antibiotics to avoid immediate population collapse because the large meatpackers and chain stores act absolutely ruthlessly to make more profit, wages have gone down across the board when compared with inflation and large parts of our societies have no emergency funds... > and loose from higher prices and poorer products produced by monopolies. Competition itself is not bad, it keeps societies from stagnation - but too much and the side effects are now worse than the starting point. The Western world after decades of "competition" now depends on genocidal dictatorships (China), ordinary dictatorships (oil sheiks) and declining democracies (India) for its basic survival, and inside of our economies we got monopolies and oligopolies at a scale that was unbelievable even in the 90s.
adithyassekhar 4y ago
This is just lopsided thinking. I have the exact opposite opinion as someone not from the west, we need open instructions to be free from the clutches of everything controlled by western countries, we need competition.
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
True patriots use Windows. Linux? What are you, a Chicom? Did you know they literally use that in North Korea?[0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

snvzz 4y ago

If the west does not adopt RISC-V, then it will simply fall behind China. I don't think this is something we want.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
That assumes that RISC-V is a competitive advantage over ARM and x86. While I have no particular grounds for pessimism about RISC-V, it seems a bit premature to assume that it's better in practice than those others.
- photonbeam 4y ago
  riscv does have something that arm/x86 doesn't have: intense implementation competition at every perf/price point Lots of companies are throwing their hat in trying to design a riscv core. You can do a riscv startup, its much harder to do an arm startup and near impossible to do an x86 one
  - stonogo 4y ago
    I've been hearing about how RISC-V is going to crush the market for over a decade, and the only fully-functional RISC-V-based product on the market is a soldering iron. Everything else is some kind of DIY proof of concept kit of no use to any actual consumer or business. The architecture has about fifteen or twenty years before they are any kind of meaningful threat to x86_64, assuming it lasts that long.
    - amaranth 4y ago
      There is a chance you're using RISC-V CPUs right now. Nvidia GPUs use them for their management logic (GSP) and Seagate/Western Digital are using them for HDD controllers. ARM used to only be used in these kinds of workloads too, you have to work your way up the stack.
    - FullyFunctional 4y ago
      Since RISC-V is barely ten years old that's quite a statement. Introducing a new instruction set is an enormous undertaking, taking multi-decades typically. If anything, the adoption of RISC-V and its momentum is astonishingly fast.
      - stonogo 4y ago
        They had hardware in 2011. Development preceded that milestone by some years at Berkeley, which is where I was first told about its impending market domination.
talideon 4y ago
China has spent ages trying to get their local MIPS derivatives to a place where they're competitive, but haven't succeeded. Adopting or not adopting RISC-V (which is only an ISA, not an actual platform) won't make a lick of difference.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Dalewyn 4y ago

The flip side is that China is pushing RISC-V because they can't develop their own homegrown microarchitecture. This is China we're talking about here, they aren't rallying behind RISC-V because they like it. It's because they can't develop anything better than RISC-V, can't license x86 or ARM (which clearly are better than RISC-V) for obvious reasons, and so they're stuck with what they can get their grubby hands on. If the west widely supports and adopts RISC-V in a way that doesn't exclude China, we are quite literally just playing into Chinese hands like the west has done time and time again. Nurturing RISC-V in itself is a noble endeavour, but we must do so in a manner that doesn't hoist our own god damn petards.

rfoo 4y ago
Then why Chinese (if they can be treated as a whole) don't just rally LoongArch?
throwaway4good 4y ago
This is just incorrect. Chinese companies have plenty of design chops.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  And what percentage does that involve stealing and reverse engineering IP from western countries?
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Try and see if you can find any stolen code here[0] or here[1]. Cheers. 0. https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc906 https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc906 1. https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910 https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910
    - lloydatkinson 4y ago
      No idea what this is or why its relevant. Do your two repositories represent the entire of industry in China? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-in-intellectual-property-from-about-30-multinational-companies/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-... "Cheers."

arlort 4y ago

I (also westerner) would still like to see RISC-V succeed, doesn't mean ARM has to fail but open competition is likely to be good in the long term. An ISA won't let China become a leader in semiconductor unless they implement it better than both western implementations of RISC-V and than ARM/Intel, the only thing it does is give an incentive to not rest on our laurels I am also fundamentally uneasy about fundamental technologies being based on just a handful of companies, whether they are western or not, I know it happens but the less it happens the better imo

c_yh 4y ago

Envy that you can become a member of Westerners.

throwaway4good 4y ago

“ It is a zero sum game all around.” It is not. We consumers benefit from competition, and loose from higher prices and poorer products produced by monopolies.

mschuster91 4y ago
> We consumers benefit from competition Look where the "competition" of the last 30 years brought the Western world: domestic electronics production is all but dead outside of military and R&D depending on quick turnaround because it got moved off to China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea, domestic pharmaceutics and chemical production is all but dead because India and China are absurdly cheaper, domestic steel production has taken serious hits for the same reason, animal welfare in farming is all but gone with farmers preventively feeding antibiotics to avoid immediate population collapse because the large meatpackers and chain stores act absolutely ruthlessly to make more profit, wages have gone down across the board when compared with inflation and large parts of our societies have no emergency funds... > and loose from higher prices and poorer products produced by monopolies. Competition itself is not bad, it keeps societies from stagnation - but too much and the side effects are now worse than the starting point. The Western world after decades of "competition" now depends on genocidal dictatorships (China), ordinary dictatorships (oil sheiks) and declining democracies (India) for its basic survival, and inside of our economies we got monopolies and oligopolies at a scale that was unbelievable even in the 90s.

adithyassekhar 4y ago

This is just lopsided thinking. I have the exact opposite opinion as someone not from the west, we need open instructions to be free from the clutches of everything controlled by western countries, we need competition.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago

True patriots use Windows. Linux? What are you, a Chicom? Did you know they literally use that in North Korea?[0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS