So we are looking at an open-sourced future which is international in scope. Does Linux have problems because there are Chinese and Russian distros as well as US and European? Will RISC-V create open-source issues where none currently exist? Might open-source hardware designs implementing RISC-V become a thing? Might commercial companies seek to add closed-source goodies to their flavours? Might they even don their national-flag underpants while they are at it? Sorry, what was the problem specific to open-sourcing an instruction set? I can't seem to remember it.

The problem is that the US is once again trying to find ways to demonize China.

They're going to use open-source tools just like we can ? The bastards !

Open Source isnt the problem then - its the US.

> Open Source isnt the problem then - its the US.

Considering the fact that the RISC-V ISA was donated to the world by an American - namely [1]David Patterson , perhaps you should consider STFU .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Patterson_(computer_scientist)

We are talking about how old politics see the open source movment. The fact that the creator of the risc-v is American is not relevant ... We make fun of American politics ... Not American people, those are 2 different entities. And if you come with the argument that American elect their representatives, just keep inind that their is not one country in the world where the population isvtotally satisfied with there gouvernant. To rephrase what was said before "open source is not the problem ... US gouvernement his"

Because things like OFAC and EAR controls are going to run up against opensource. If you are in the USA can you accept a pull request on your project from someone in Cuba or Syria or Iran?

Do you have to refuse to supply them with a copy of the source? If that's so are you able to comply with the GPL? Is the GPL invalid in any country that has export controls on opensource software?

It's a lot easier to scare politicians with stories about designs for "chips used in missiles" being given to foreigners than it is to talk about software licenses. If Intel somebody acting purely out of patriotism, gets a case made that you can't collaborate on an opensource chip design with foreigners. Then the same rulings are applied to software.

International geopolitics doesn’t raise any problems at all that are specific to open-sourcing instruction sets.

However, a lot of commenters seem to feel that open-sourcing will *solve* some geopolitical supply issues. And they are simply wrong about that. It makes zero difference, because there are dozens of technical pinchpoints, precisely none of which is the instruction set. But because most of the people here are software people, not ASIC designers, they don’t know about any of the other pinchpoints, so this looks like magic beans to them.

Other pinchpoints: Necessary IP cores that aren’t the CPU; EDA tool sets. Have all the source code you like, but have you understood that what you might call a compiler, and we call synthesis, layout, design rule checkers, EM solvers, they are all under license, largely from companies like Synopsys headquartered in Mountain View? And yes there are some open source synthesis engines, but they’re *grim* - they work, but you’ll be paying a silicon area and clock frequency tax of 20-30%….if they don’t just crash under the load of any design larger than a hobbyist one. And then there’s packaging. Advanced packaging solutions like chiplets….who is doing that for you?

And I’ve really not even started on the problems of trying be independent of the US and China. Instruction-set….mate, if that were all it were, I would have knocked it up over lockdown on my laptop at home. It’s really not that hard. You just think it is, because it’s the only bit you come into contact with.

I know you think I’m being rude, but I’m really not. Look at it this way: the instruction set is the API to the hardware. If you had to code up Linux, *all of it* from scratch, and someone came up to you and said “psssst….don’t worry I’ve done it for you. Here’s the APIs.” How impressed would you be?

There’s no doubt they’ve done *some* work - structuring the problem is a big thing. But *all* of it - or even enough to make a big dent in coding the whole thing? No

There are open source tools for the whole of pretty much any ASIC design chain. There has been since I was designing chips in the 80s. Last time I looked I could feed the Verilog or VHDL into Electric or even Kicad and get a not particularly windy layout.

No-one is asking the important question here.

Is it RISC-Vee

or

RISC-5

What are we saying?

According to the spec (linked in the article), it is RISC 5.

The French have suggested a compromise, RISC-cinq

For classicists it's RISC quinque.

I've always thought Vee. With my track record, that almost certainly means it should be Five.

But pronounced JIF

That was a lemon.

> On the one hand, it's all positive on the RISC-V front, with its open-source ethos [ ... ]

> On the other hand, the borderless nature of the emerging instruction set architecture – which is royalty-free to implement – could open another front in the chip arms race between the nations. Countries are turning to RISC-V to create homegrown processors and accelerators amid sanctions, shortages, and other barriers obstructing the free trade of semiconductor technology.

First of all, I did not know that there was a chips arms race between the nations . Which nations?

The author appears to believe that only the US, China and Russia design and make semiconductor chips, and that the rest of the world is completely left out of the chips party.

Is the author aware that countries such as the UK, Germany, France, etc, do have high definition TV's, microwaves, dishwashers, cars, smartphones, etc?

I've got news: there are many other countries that design and manufacture chips, besides the US, China and Russia. Does the author know, for example, that the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Israel, Canada, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, all these countries are perfectly capable, and indeed do design and produce semiconductor chips?

Is the author aware that the major US chip manufacturers - Intel, AMD, IBM - have research centers in countries over the world?

> The US is threatening to cut off microchip supplies to Russia if the country invades Ukraine. But Russian companies that include Yadro and Elbrus are developing capable RISC-V cores as an alternative to x86 and Arm-based parts.

I don't know if this statement is intentionally half-true, or just ignorant. Yes, the US has threatened to cut off microchip supplies to Russia. What the author forgot to mention is that the US also depends on raw materials imported from Russia for its own production of microchips:

[1]https://www.reuters.com/technology/white-house-tells-chip-industry-brace-russian-supply-disruptions-2022-02-11/

So does the EU, for that matter. Do the math.

> The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is on the US Entity List of trade-restricted organizations, has developed 64-bit RISC-V cores while drawing on open-source blueprints made available by companies in America and Europe.

Correction:

> The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is on the US Entity List of trade-restricted organizations, has developed 64-bit RISC-V cores copied from open-source blueprints made available by companies in America and Europe.

So, on the one hand, the US and the EU are making these microchip blueprints available to anyone to use, for free, and with no royalties. But then, and at the same time, the US and EU are persecuting Poor Little China. Awesome logic there.

Do the Chinese companies that manufacture these RISC-V chips record a profit from their sales of said chips? Chips that are based on designs originating in the US and the EU?

> But questions remain on which RISC-V chip developers, and in what countries, will be able to access Intel’s factories to produce components.

Not China and not Russia. Do China or Russia share their fab plants with the US?

> RISC-V is appealing because engineers have the freedom to implement the specification, optimizing and extending their designs as they need, or use an off-the-shelf core, and the modular nature of the architecture's extension system to meet different workloads in computing.

Aha. But the US - BAD . We gave you the RISC-V ISA for free, we published silicon designs on GitHub, but hey, Intel isn't willing to share with China their fab production lines that are designated National Security, because these have military applications. And because we don't really want Chinese spies running around and copying PDF's more than they already do.

What's next? Should Intel also fab China's chips for free, so that they don't feel so persecuted and left out?

If you want to make chips, build your own fab plants.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/white-house-tells-chip-industry-brace-russian-supply-disruptions-2022-02-11/

As somebody who assumes that the "adding lightning to sand and making it think" is basically magic and who just does software.

RISC-V just defines an API right ? Presumably there aren't too many innovative new Assembly Language instructions, especially in RISC, they are supposed to be simple right? (This is based on my doing a few weeks of ARM2 assembler after having learned 6502 as a kid)

So what's the massive lead of ARM over RISC-V? Obviously the silicon design of an Apple M1 is incredible, but you get this by being Apple+TSMC, not by buying an ARM license. Presumably Apple could have done the same design around a RISC-V instruction set?

Does ARM supply all the super-scaler / out of order pipeline / branch prediction magic we all rely on - as part of the licence design? Or is it just that there are more optomised ARM core designs out there, more people familiar with them, more tooling, more compilers etc etc ?

RISC-V defines the API but there are also many freely available Verilog or VHDL or other languages complete CPU designs that you can take and either process straight into silicon CPUs layouts (or even GaAs) with open source tools if you have a process to target, or modify and extend for your own purposes. The open bits and pieces libraries seem to grow weekly and there's even GPU stuff that you can play with and evaluate and extend.