> 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.
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.
This is just incorrect. Chinese companies have plenty of design chops.
And what percentage does that involve stealing and reverse engineering IP from western countries?
Cheers.