In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China - a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders.
Why does ARM hardware become obsolete after a few years? Lacking ongoing software support and no mainline Linux?
Correct. (And firmware support.)
What does that have to do with the instruction set license?
Barrier to entry (cost) and license restrictions (non-disclosure) are generally problematic for anyone wanting to ship open hardware.
If you think RISC-V implementors who actually make the damn chips won’t ship locked hardware that only run signed and encrypted binary blobs, you are in for a disappointing ride.
I don’t think anyone expects existing ARM device makers to change their behavior with RISC-V. Rather, RISC-V opens the door to new players who do things differently.
Seeing the runaway succes of others like Nvidia, Apple, Mediatek, do you think any meaningful new entries are going to deviate from their playbook?
Being a good citizen with regards to transparency in firmware and Linux support is not a proven differentiator for these vendors and shown time and time again not to be a requirement for success.
I see steadily increasing interest in privacy, data security, repairability, and e-waste reduction. The markets for these things may be relatively small today, but they are growing, and open hardware can address all of them.
do you think any meaningful new entries are going to deviate from their playbook?
Curious choice of words. I suppose it depends on how we define “meaningful”. There are measures of success other than becoming a trillion-dollar market capitalization tech giant. There are many businesses that succeed despite being different, in some cases because they are different.
More concretely, we have already been seeing new entries for several years. (Purism and Raptor Computing Systems, for example.) They have thus far been limited in what they can offer, partly due to the lack of truly open and affordable components, and partly because the demand for products like theirs is just getting started. But both of those hindrances are changing.
I think how much this area will develop and grow depends on how we either support it or impede it with obstacles. I hope attempts at short-term defence against a rival won’t lead us to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Correct. (And firmware support.)
Barrier to entry (cost) and license restrictions (non-disclosure) are generally problematic for anyone wanting to ship open hardware.
I don’t think anyone expects existing ARM device makers to change their behavior with RISC-V. Rather, RISC-V opens the door to new players who do things differently.
Seeing the runaway succes of others like Nvidia, Apple, Mediatek, do you think any meaningful new entries are going to deviate from their playbook?
Being a good citizen with regards to transparency in firmware and Linux support is not a proven differentiator for these vendors and shown time and time again not to be a requirement for success.
I see steadily increasing interest in privacy, data security, repairability, and e-waste reduction. The markets for these things may be relatively small today, but they are growing, and open hardware can address all of them.
Curious choice of words. I suppose it depends on how we define “meaningful”. There are measures of success other than becoming a trillion-dollar market capitalization tech giant. There are many businesses that succeed despite being different, in some cases because they are different.
More concretely, we have already been seeing new entries for several years. (Purism and Raptor Computing Systems, for example.) They have thus far been limited in what they can offer, partly due to the lack of truly open and affordable components, and partly because the demand for products like theirs is just getting started. But both of those hindrances are changing.
I think how much this area will develop and grow depends on how we either support it or impede it with obstacles. I hope attempts at short-term defence against a rival won’t lead us to shoot ourselves in the foot.