Posted on 06/07/2023 3:25:15 AM PDT by FarCenter
The launch of a new RISC-V software association makes open-standard integrated circuit design and open-source software even more of a challenge for the US government’s efforts to stop the development of Chinese high-tech and bend Europe to its geopolitical will.
On May 31, Linux Foundation Europe announced the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE), which it described as,
a new collaborative effort that brings together global industry leaders committed to accelerating the availability of software for high-performance and power-efficient RISC-V cores [processing units] running high-level operating systems for a variety of market segments.
Those market segments include cloud computing, data centers, automobiles, mobile phones and other consumer electronics. Hosted by Linux Foundation Europe, RISE supports the global open standard activities of RISC-V International.
Gabriele Columbro, General Manager of Linux Foundation Europe, notes that,
The RISE Project is dedicated to enabling RISC-V in open-source tools and libraries (LLVM and GCC, etc) to speed implementation and time to market. RISC-V is a cornerstone of the European technology and industrial landscape so we’re honored to provide a neutral, trusted home for the RISE Project under Linux Foundation Europe.
Thirteen companies from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China form the RISE Governing Board: NVIDIA, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Intel, Samsung, Google, Andes, Red Hat, Imagination Technologies, Rivos, SiFive, Ventana and T-Head.
It’s significant that T-Head is included. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alibaba, a fabless semiconductor design company that develops application-specific ICs for artificial intelligence, cloud computing, industrial, financial, consumer electronics and other applications. In effect, it is the Alibaba group’s semiconductor division.
According to T-Head Vice President Jianyi Meng,
T-Head has been contributing to the software ecosystem through initiatives such as putting various operating systems onto RISC-V and contributing an integrated development environment to the RISC-V community. Together with other global business leaders for the RISE Project and our partners across sectors, we can further drive the growth of the open-source software ecosystem.
Speaking at a conference in Shanghai at the beginning of March, Meng said,
The development of RISC-V requires global innovation collaboration, from chips to software, applications and terminals. T-Head is pulling together the major ecosystems so that global developers and partners can better use and develop RISC-V technologies.
At that time, T-Head and Alipay also announced plans to enable secure payments on wearable devices using embedded RISC-V processors.
The rise of RISC-V, particularly in China, is likely to be negative for Arm and its Japanese owner Softbank, which plans to take Arm public later this year. Proprietary instruction-set architectures from Arm are seen as high-risk by the Chinese due to potential US influence on their owner.
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US software development jobs have been getting off-shored for decades and nobody that I know of except Trump seemed to care about it. Now the government wants sanctions on China technology? It’s too late (IMO).
I recall running MPE and HP-UX on RISC-based processors more than 30 years ago.
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