7 ms·

China Is Building an Open National Chip Plan Around RISC-V

91 points by kosasbest 3y ago

mark_l_watson 3y ago
I wrote here years ago that it is in every countries best interest to do the following: 1. Be able to fab chips required to run their infrastructure (business and military). 2. Either have a home grown commercial operating system, or their own Linux distro and required application software. 3. Maintain their own unique culture and arts. 4. Have some degree of food independence, even if it is an emergency only limited meat diet. Small countries can only partially achieve this level of independence, but all countries should try. I think the world is even more beautiful with more diversity.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  There would also be more wars. One of the big changes in the 20th century is that now every country is interdependent on every other, so going to war is even more costly for both sides, being cut off from half the world's supply chains. If you draw a chart of percentage of all humans alive who die in war, there is a sudden dropoff around 1900.
  - bsder 3y ago
    Mostly due to vaccines. Wasn't WWI the first war in which more soldiers died from trauma than disease?
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    I would love to see this chart, as I doubt that’s at all accurate considering how many died in the two world wars.
  - netbioserror 3y ago
    War is the most costly when a government cannot fund it through debt and inflation. Nations used to go bankrupt waging war when precious metals were money. Now, they can defer the financial consequences approximately indefinitely, at least until we discover the straw the breaks the camel's back (IMO this is when debt servicing cost overtakes all other expenses and starts to consume more wealth than economic output).
    - imtringued 3y ago
      I don't know why people mention precious metals as "harbingers of peace". What happened in the Roman empire is that private citizens assembled their own armies instead to usurp the emperor, repeatedly, several dozen times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor
      - netbioserror 3y ago
        The Romans still physically debased their money, and in the late Western empire, this was a strong contributor to its inability to hold onto its military units as citizens and barbarians became increasingly unwilling to accept denarii as pay. Thus, the erosion of its authority and the rise of barracks emperors. I should note that much later in the Eastern empire, after a long period of wallowing in inflation, corruption, and an ineffectual army, Anastasius I reformed the monetary system by refining the purities (and thus supplies) of coinage, which allowed him to clamp down on the state's accounting and tighten up the army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasius_I_Dicorus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasius_I_Dicorus
  - steno132 3y ago
    And in the century that followed 1900, history's first two world wars occured. If anything, interdependence creates more destructive wars because countries group themselves into (global) blocs who now go to war.
  - adrianmsmith 3y ago
    > There would also be more wars. One of the big changes in the 20th century is that now every country is interdependent on every other, so going to war is even more costly for both sides, being cut off from half the world's supply chains. This is often repeated, and I believed it myself in the past as being self-evident, but the Russia/Ukraine war has changed my mind. Russia was selling gas, the west was buying gas. Other countries produced e.g. iPhones and Russians were buying them. It seemed to be a classic case of a situation where everyone loses if there's war, but yet the war happened anyway.
    - wwtrv 3y ago
      > if there's war, but yet the war happened anyway. That doesen't mean that 10 additional wars wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's a bit like saying that safety standards don't matter because people still die in car crashes. Of course, you're right in a way. For the system to work you have to assume that states are governed by rational actors and that their citizens prefer having access to iPhones and other foreign goods (and not destroying their economy in general) over "fighting nazis/homosexuals/{insert idiotic thing}"... Russia's current account surplus finally became negative in the last few months so if that continues and their currency continues crashing, hopefully living standards for ordinary Russians will start decreasing at a faster pace and maybe they'll start thinking about regime change. Then again 2x more deaths during a single years than throughout the entire 10 year long war in Afghanistan didn't bother them to much so who knows...
    - boeingUH60 3y ago
      One exception does not make the theory untrue. Consider sworn enemies like China and the US still trading with each other despite their soured relationship. And seeing how Russia has been severely weakened by Putin’s imperialist tendencies, other countries would be wary of repeating the same thing.
      - Teever 3y ago
        It isn't trade that keeps the peace, it's MAD and the United States policing the seas.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  this idea is so tremendously disconnected from the actual force of movement every day that makes up the changing nation-states for the last three thousand years.. ending with a beneficial wish. it almost indicates a single brilliant mind is actually pretty-useless when it comes to daily practical trade.
- goodbyesf 3y ago
  > I wrote here years ago that it is in every countries best interest to do the following: Been saying the same thing myself. Every major company should own their own tech, media, etc stack. They should ban all competitors until they have their own homegrown champion. When india banned tiktok, I praised it thinking india will also ban facebook, google, twitter, etc in order to establish their own social media and tech ecosystem. Instead, the indian leadership just handed their social media space to facebook. China talked big about developing their own operating system, but seems to have limited it only to the public sector while microsoft, google and apple dominate the private sector. And lets not get started with the EU. Even though it's not a country, but the lack of participation by any european country in any major tech development of the past few decades is embarrassing. > Small countries can only partially achieve this level of independence, but all countries should try. Small to mid sized countries should form blocs of some kind to achieve some kind of independence. > I think the world is even more beautiful with more diversity. Exactly. What I despise are those who claim to support diversity while demanding everyone speak the same language, adhere to the same 'values', partake in the same culture, etc.
- Proven 3y ago
  [dead]
- lm28469 3y ago
  Yes, but this runs against everything the globalisation movement of the last 50 years wants
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Its nonsense and totally unnecessary and wasteful for every country to try this.
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    An IC fabrication machine (+ cleanroom around it) doesn't get more efficient if you heap 100 of 'm together. Sure there's economies of scale. But @ some point you get diminishing returns, where many-billion $ investment is needed to eek out another few % of margin. And if latest tech is too high a bar: older process nodes are simpler / cheaper. No reason a country of 10M+ can't have a few of their own to manufacture uC, automotive chips, jellybean stuff like opamps, etc. And don't forget supply line issues like shipping IC's across the world just to package them. Just wasteful. Having only the very latest tech made elsewhere, would be a good start. Agree with 2/3/4 of OP. Not always possible, but should be tried.
LatteLazy 3y ago
Cutting them off from world supplies is a pain in the arse for China in the short term, but a huge boon for them in the medium/long term. Now there is a huge market and motivated government. There is nothing magic about silicon that means China won't master it given the time and motivation... And given that the west either really needs AI to be worth a damn (and a defendable advantage) or we're one step closer to the Chinese century or whatever dramatic thing were calling it...
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Your first paragraph remains to be seen and the second is hilariously pro-Chinese. There’s little reason to think the Chinese can actually compete with the US without their help, let alone the entire western world.
  - LatteLazy 3y ago
    My statement isn't meant to be pro Chinese. And saying "don't underestimate china" is only pro Chinese if you think underestimating China is a good idea... Also, in this matter, China is not competing with the US. The US already lost out to Taiwan in semiconductor manufacturing. The idea that there is something magic about the US and no Chinese people could ever compete with us is at best very silly.
    - gloryjulio 3y ago
      Why are you mixing up Chinese ppl and China? Taiwan is not China. If your are talking about the race there are Chinese everywhere.
      - LatteLazy 3y ago
        I haven't mixed them up. I think Chinese people are capable of producing just as good a quality of chips as non Chinese people. Apparently that's controversial!? Also I did not say Taiwan is China. No idea where you got that?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
This might not be good for RISC-V in the future. If it becomes associated with Chinese computing, then it might face more sanctions and roadblocks in the US and Europe.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  Maybe it will force missile-gap thinking to get Western firms to compete directly. I could see Western governments dangling big contracts or research grants to firms like ST and Microchip, just to make sure they have a RISC-V product line that crowds THead or WCH parts out of the market.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
    I think it will instead cause them to force companies to drop RISC-V development. After all, an instruction set’s fabrication, tooling, software are far more valuable than any theoretical advantage of the instruction set itself. (For example, see how long x86 has been going). The goal would be to leave China with an architecture that nobody else uses.
    - gary_0 3y ago
      It's far too late for that. Over 10 billion RISC-V chips are already in use in GPUs, hard drives, automobiles, and so on. Uncountable person-hours have been put into adding RISC-V support to Linux, Android, Chromium, GCC, and thousands of other libraries and software packages. Google, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Samsung, and nVidia are among[0] the RISC-V organization's many members, who have already collectively invested billions of dollars in the technology. At this point, telling the tech industry to stop using RISC-V would be like telling them to stop using Linux. [0] https://riscv.org/members/ https://riscv.org/members/
- photonbeam 3y ago
  The cat is out out the ISA bag. They'll just sanction the products containing chips from particular fabs instead. They currently sanction on all sorts of arbitrary lines, for example memory bandwidth
steno132 3y ago
China won't stop at anything to have a semiconductor industry that's not dependent on Western powers. Why won't the US? I truly become the time for decoupling from China has come. It will require a massive economic cost. China's economy will suffer greatly and many millions will be prevented from overcoming poverty. And, it's worth it. It's absolutely necessary to ensure our country's security. We just can't depend on an adversary for critical goods.
- eunos 3y ago
  No thx. Globalized manufacturing ensured affordable everyday goods which accelerates QoL improvement. Take a look at the state of automobiles which is not that liberalized unlike electronic manufacturing for some reasons. Only one new car in the U.S. now sells for under $20,000 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mitsubishi-mirage-cheapest-new-car-2023-below-20000/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mitsubishi-mirage-cheapest-new-...
- Tactician_mark 3y ago
  Decoupling? You want to eliminate trade between the world's two biggest economies? This feels like economic policy from the 18th century. The decline of mercantilism and expansion of free trade ushered in modern global prosperity. Tariffs, protectionism, and trade wars still exist, but nothing like what you're suggesting. It's not just China's economy that would be affected - the developed world lives on cheap foreign goods, and any politician that suggests sacrificing that much quality of life for "security" wouldn't last long.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >the developed world lives on cheap foreign goods, and any politician that suggests sacrificing that much quality of life for "security" wouldn't last long The majority of the world consider their quality of life depend on stuff like jobs, housing, healthcare and childcare, not having cheap e-waste. Sure, it's nice that now I can afford to watch 4k movies beamed wirelessly to my phone which is a powerful computer in my palm, while I'm on the toilet in my tiny apartament, but I'd rather be able to afford a bigger apartment and be contempt with older shiny tech. I'm not against free trade between nations, I'm against imbalanced free trade. We're trading with partners who are on the opposite spectrum of labor laws, environmental laws, etc,. making local workers/companies unable to compete in the race to the bottom, costing a lot of working class jobs and environmental damage be x10 except not in our back yard.
obscurette 3y ago
That's how CCP is using open source, open standards etc to kill competition. They have done it several times before for example with security cameras market - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljo8pZny2n4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljo8pZny2n4

91 points by kosasbest 3y ago

I wrote here years ago that it is in every countries best interest to do the following: 1. Be able to fab chips required to run their infrastructure (business and military). 2. Either have a home grown commercial operating system, or their own Linux distro and required application software. 3. Maintain their own unique culture and arts. 4. Have some degree of food independence, even if it is an emergency only limited meat diet. Small countries can only partially achieve this level of independence, but all countries should try. I think the world is even more beautiful with more diversity.

londons_explore 3y ago
There would also be more wars. One of the big changes in the 20th century is that now every country is interdependent on every other, so going to war is even more costly for both sides, being cut off from half the world's supply chains. If you draw a chart of percentage of all humans alive who die in war, there is a sudden dropoff around 1900.
- bsder 3y ago
  Mostly due to vaccines. Wasn't WWI the first war in which more soldiers died from trauma than disease?
- edgyquant 3y ago
  I would love to see this chart, as I doubt that’s at all accurate considering how many died in the two world wars.
- netbioserror 3y ago
  War is the most costly when a government cannot fund it through debt and inflation. Nations used to go bankrupt waging war when precious metals were money. Now, they can defer the financial consequences approximately indefinitely, at least until we discover the straw the breaks the camel's back (IMO this is when debt servicing cost overtakes all other expenses and starts to consume more wealth than economic output).
  - imtringued 3y ago
    I don't know why people mention precious metals as "harbingers of peace". What happened in the Roman empire is that private citizens assembled their own armies instead to usurp the emperor, repeatedly, several dozen times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor
    - netbioserror 3y ago
      The Romans still physically debased their money, and in the late Western empire, this was a strong contributor to its inability to hold onto its military units as citizens and barbarians became increasingly unwilling to accept denarii as pay. Thus, the erosion of its authority and the rise of barracks emperors. I should note that much later in the Eastern empire, after a long period of wallowing in inflation, corruption, and an ineffectual army, Anastasius I reformed the monetary system by refining the purities (and thus supplies) of coinage, which allowed him to clamp down on the state's accounting and tighten up the army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasius_I_Dicorus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasius_I_Dicorus
- steno132 3y ago
  And in the century that followed 1900, history's first two world wars occured. If anything, interdependence creates more destructive wars because countries group themselves into (global) blocs who now go to war.
- adrianmsmith 3y ago
  > There would also be more wars. One of the big changes in the 20th century is that now every country is interdependent on every other, so going to war is even more costly for both sides, being cut off from half the world's supply chains. This is often repeated, and I believed it myself in the past as being self-evident, but the Russia/Ukraine war has changed my mind. Russia was selling gas, the west was buying gas. Other countries produced e.g. iPhones and Russians were buying them. It seemed to be a classic case of a situation where everyone loses if there's war, but yet the war happened anyway.
  - wwtrv 3y ago
    > if there's war, but yet the war happened anyway. That doesen't mean that 10 additional wars wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's a bit like saying that safety standards don't matter because people still die in car crashes. Of course, you're right in a way. For the system to work you have to assume that states are governed by rational actors and that their citizens prefer having access to iPhones and other foreign goods (and not destroying their economy in general) over "fighting nazis/homosexuals/{insert idiotic thing}"... Russia's current account surplus finally became negative in the last few months so if that continues and their currency continues crashing, hopefully living standards for ordinary Russians will start decreasing at a faster pace and maybe they'll start thinking about regime change. Then again 2x more deaths during a single years than throughout the entire 10 year long war in Afghanistan didn't bother them to much so who knows...
  - boeingUH60 3y ago
    One exception does not make the theory untrue. Consider sworn enemies like China and the US still trading with each other despite their soured relationship. And seeing how Russia has been severely weakened by Putin’s imperialist tendencies, other countries would be wary of repeating the same thing.
    - Teever 3y ago
      It isn't trade that keeps the peace, it's MAD and the United States policing the seas.
mistrial9 3y ago
this idea is so tremendously disconnected from the actual force of movement every day that makes up the changing nation-states for the last three thousand years.. ending with a beneficial wish. it almost indicates a single brilliant mind is actually pretty-useless when it comes to daily practical trade.
goodbyesf 3y ago
> I wrote here years ago that it is in every countries best interest to do the following: Been saying the same thing myself. Every major company should own their own tech, media, etc stack. They should ban all competitors until they have their own homegrown champion. When india banned tiktok, I praised it thinking india will also ban facebook, google, twitter, etc in order to establish their own social media and tech ecosystem. Instead, the indian leadership just handed their social media space to facebook. China talked big about developing their own operating system, but seems to have limited it only to the public sector while microsoft, google and apple dominate the private sector. And lets not get started with the EU. Even though it's not a country, but the lack of participation by any european country in any major tech development of the past few decades is embarrassing. > Small countries can only partially achieve this level of independence, but all countries should try. Small to mid sized countries should form blocs of some kind to achieve some kind of independence. > I think the world is even more beautiful with more diversity. Exactly. What I despise are those who claim to support diversity while demanding everyone speak the same language, adhere to the same 'values', partake in the same culture, etc.
Proven 3y ago
[dead]
lm28469 3y ago
Yes, but this runs against everything the globalisation movement of the last 50 years wants
panick21_ 3y ago
Its nonsense and totally unnecessary and wasteful for every country to try this.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  An IC fabrication machine (+ cleanroom around it) doesn't get more efficient if you heap 100 of 'm together. Sure there's economies of scale. But @ some point you get diminishing returns, where many-billion $ investment is needed to eek out another few % of margin. And if latest tech is too high a bar: older process nodes are simpler / cheaper. No reason a country of 10M+ can't have a few of their own to manufacture uC, automotive chips, jellybean stuff like opamps, etc. And don't forget supply line issues like shipping IC's across the world just to package them. Just wasteful. Having only the very latest tech made elsewhere, would be a good start. Agree with 2/3/4 of OP. Not always possible, but should be tried.

LatteLazy 3y ago

Cutting them off from world supplies is a pain in the arse for China in the short term, but a huge boon for them in the medium/long term. Now there is a huge market and motivated government. There is nothing magic about silicon that means China won't master it given the time and motivation... And given that the west either really needs AI to be worth a damn (and a defendable advantage) or we're one step closer to the Chinese century or whatever dramatic thing were calling it...

edgyquant 3y ago
Your first paragraph remains to be seen and the second is hilariously pro-Chinese. There’s little reason to think the Chinese can actually compete with the US without their help, let alone the entire western world.
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  My statement isn't meant to be pro Chinese. And saying "don't underestimate china" is only pro Chinese if you think underestimating China is a good idea... Also, in this matter, China is not competing with the US. The US already lost out to Taiwan in semiconductor manufacturing. The idea that there is something magic about the US and no Chinese people could ever compete with us is at best very silly.
  - gloryjulio 3y ago
    Why are you mixing up Chinese ppl and China? Taiwan is not China. If your are talking about the race there are Chinese everywhere.
    - LatteLazy 3y ago
      I haven't mixed them up. I think Chinese people are capable of producing just as good a quality of chips as non Chinese people. Apparently that's controversial!? Also I did not say Taiwan is China. No idea where you got that?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

This might not be good for RISC-V in the future. If it becomes associated with Chinese computing, then it might face more sanctions and roadblocks in the US and Europe.

hakfoo 3y ago
Maybe it will force missile-gap thinking to get Western firms to compete directly. I could see Western governments dangling big contracts or research grants to firms like ST and Microchip, just to make sure they have a RISC-V product line that crowds THead or WCH parts out of the market.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  I think it will instead cause them to force companies to drop RISC-V development. After all, an instruction set’s fabrication, tooling, software are far more valuable than any theoretical advantage of the instruction set itself. (For example, see how long x86 has been going). The goal would be to leave China with an architecture that nobody else uses.
  - gary_0 3y ago
    It's far too late for that. Over 10 billion RISC-V chips are already in use in GPUs, hard drives, automobiles, and so on. Uncountable person-hours have been put into adding RISC-V support to Linux, Android, Chromium, GCC, and thousands of other libraries and software packages. Google, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Samsung, and nVidia are among[0] the RISC-V organization's many members, who have already collectively invested billions of dollars in the technology. At this point, telling the tech industry to stop using RISC-V would be like telling them to stop using Linux. [0] https://riscv.org/members/ https://riscv.org/members/
photonbeam 3y ago
The cat is out out the ISA bag. They'll just sanction the products containing chips from particular fabs instead. They currently sanction on all sorts of arbitrary lines, for example memory bandwidth

steno132 3y ago

China won't stop at anything to have a semiconductor industry that's not dependent on Western powers. Why won't the US? I truly become the time for decoupling from China has come. It will require a massive economic cost. China's economy will suffer greatly and many millions will be prevented from overcoming poverty. And, it's worth it. It's absolutely necessary to ensure our country's security. We just can't depend on an adversary for critical goods.

eunos 3y ago
No thx. Globalized manufacturing ensured affordable everyday goods which accelerates QoL improvement. Take a look at the state of automobiles which is not that liberalized unlike electronic manufacturing for some reasons. Only one new car in the U.S. now sells for under $20,000 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mitsubishi-mirage-cheapest-new-car-2023-below-20000/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mitsubishi-mirage-cheapest-new-...
Tactician_mark 3y ago
Decoupling? You want to eliminate trade between the world's two biggest economies? This feels like economic policy from the 18th century. The decline of mercantilism and expansion of free trade ushered in modern global prosperity. Tariffs, protectionism, and trade wars still exist, but nothing like what you're suggesting. It's not just China's economy that would be affected - the developed world lives on cheap foreign goods, and any politician that suggests sacrificing that much quality of life for "security" wouldn't last long.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >the developed world lives on cheap foreign goods, and any politician that suggests sacrificing that much quality of life for "security" wouldn't last long The majority of the world consider their quality of life depend on stuff like jobs, housing, healthcare and childcare, not having cheap e-waste. Sure, it's nice that now I can afford to watch 4k movies beamed wirelessly to my phone which is a powerful computer in my palm, while I'm on the toilet in my tiny apartament, but I'd rather be able to afford a bigger apartment and be contempt with older shiny tech. I'm not against free trade between nations, I'm against imbalanced free trade. We're trading with partners who are on the opposite spectrum of labor laws, environmental laws, etc,. making local workers/companies unable to compete in the race to the bottom, costing a lot of working class jobs and environmental damage be x10 except not in our back yard.

obscurette 3y ago

That's how CCP is using open source, open standards etc to kill competition. They have done it several times before for example with security cameras market - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljo8pZny2n4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljo8pZny2n4