RISC-V: China's Use of Open Source ISA Worries US

Make it difficult for China to use RISC-V ISA. The idea is that the U.S. Commerce Department is toying with the following doubts raised by lawmakers.

In late 2023, members of the House Select Committee on U.S.-Chinese Communist Party Strategic Competition raised concerns. Concerns that RISC-V could compromise efforts It was undertaken by the US to prevent China from acquiring advanced chips, thus undermining both its technological and, above all, military progress.

The open source RISC-V ISA was developed at the University of California – Berkeley: Developers can Use royalty free To develop proprietary or open source implementations for commercial or other applications.

Faced with increasing barriers, China is beginning to take a serious look at RISC-V., its maturity is growing day by day, an exciting and expanding ecosystem of companies implementing different types of projects: Tenstorrent, Imagination Technologies, SiFive and many others. Even in China there is no shortage of examples like giant Alibaba.

“The benefits of open source collaboration in RISC-V promise to be significant, but can only be realized when contributors work with the sole goal of advancing technology, and not advancing the geopolitical interests of the People's Republic of China,” he wrote. In a letter last November, representatives called for “building a robust ecosystem for open source collaboration between the United States and our allies, ensuring that the PRC cannot benefit from such work.”

So committee members rAddressed by US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, asking it to consider whether something could be done about RISC-V. Second Reuters, The Department of Commerce started that processin order to “Assess potential risks and check that adequate measures are in place Under the authority of the Department of Commerce which can effectively address any concerns.”

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Commerce Department added Care should be taken not to harm American companies People who are part of international teams working on RISC-V technology. At this time It is not clear what measures can be taken and whether they will be effective.

Export bans on the most powerful AI accelerators, for example from NVIDIA, have created secondary channels and methods that have allowed these products to arrive in China, albeit in small quantities. But if you can block a product, it's much harder to block or restrict the use of public and open sourceStarting with the performance of benchmarking bodies like RISC-V International, unless we completely screw it up.