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 acro...
"Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry," Rubio said in a statement to Reuters. "If we don't broaden our export controls to include this threat, China will one day surpass us as the global leader in chip design."
… I’m lost. So China is developing a technology that can be inspected and used by anybody, and Americans are upset because… it might be more advanced than theirs? What export controls do they propose? A Great Wall of Github so Chinese scientists have to use VPNs to research code?
The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips. U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws
Abusing. Lmao. In capitalist America, the government wants to force you at gunpoint to monetize your creation
An interesting fact about RISC-V is that NASA is standardizing on it as the basis for future space-based computer systems. The idea is to reduce dependence on proprietary systems in favour of standard modules that could be sourced from multiple vendors.
The dirty little secret of NASA, specifically to benefit the defence contractors that pay off the senators who control NASA's pursestrings, is that it has always relied on private companies. NASA does not, and never has, built a production rocket or a crew vehicle. They build only prototypes for R&D purposes, then hand that R&D over to private companies. They outsource construction of production rockets and crew vehicles to for-profit companies. Literally the only change in the "commercial" aspect nowadays is that they're also allowing those companies to do design work as well (under close supervision).
Here's a brief history of American rockets and crew vehicles:
Even before WW2 was over and Operation Paperclip gave a bunch of nazis jobs at NACA (later NASA), the US Army Air Force contracted out the reverse-engineering of captured V-2 rockets to the Chrysler corporation. Yes, the car company. That was on the basis of their engineering acumen.
The famous X-15 rocket plane (best known to the general public as the suborbital craft that Neil Armstrong flies in the opening scene of the movie "First Man") was built by North American Aviation (later known as North American Rockwell, later later Rockwell International).
Mercury, the original crewed space program, used crew vehicles built by McDonnell Aircraft (later part of McDonnell Douglas, later later part of Boeing). The two rockets in the program were also built by McDonnell Aircraft: first the Mercury-Redstone, and later the Mercury-Atlas.
The next crew vehicle, Gemini, was also built by McDonnell Aircraft. It rode on a rocket called the Titan II GLV, built by the Glenn L Martin company, which was the "Martin" in "Lockheed-Martin". That rocket was a derivative of the Titan II nuclear ICBM.
The moon-landing Apollo program's crewed command module was built by the aforementione North American Aviation. The lunar lander was built by Grumman (later known as Northrop Grumman). The legendary Saturn V, to this day the most powerful rocket to ever successfully fly a mission, had stages built by Boeing, North American Aviation, and Douglas (later merged with the aforementioned McDonnell Aircraft).
The US space shuttle, officially called the "Space Transportation System", was built by Rockwell. Its iconic big orange fuel tank was built by the aforementioned Martin. The solid-fuel boosters were built by Thiokol, which has had so damn many mergers and name changes but is now part of the same Northrop Grumman that built the Apollo lunar lander. They're still building lengthened versions of those same boosters for the new MIC grift called SLS. SLS is the US senate's way to keep space shuttle contractors pockets lined with cash by cobbling together a frankenstein of 1970s-era-design space shuttle spare parts. It'll cost billions per launch, and is production-rate-limited to flying about once every two years.
The same goes for every single rocket that has ever put a NASA payload into orbit. Not a single NASA space probe has ever launched on a NASA-built rocket. Not one.
I'm not trying to defend Musk here. I'm just trying to get the point across that the "new" commercial direction is really nothing new. All that's changed is that NASA is being slightly more hands-off with regards to design. They're still keeping a tight leash on quality control, thankfully.
lmao all the undergrad computer architecture classes teach using RISC-V as the example. An entire generation of engineers are gonna graduate with an education for something they legally can't work on.
Debian has already had a great amount of their packages working with RISC-V (enough for a simple GNOME desktop)
Free software is finally looking to trash amd64 and x86 in the coming decade or so as the default architecture. It would be incredibly awesome if China has the first GNU/NonGNU linux distribution.
Perhaps the year of the Linux desktop will be a Communist victory.
I was just reading about RISC-V yesterday. Apparently Pine64 makes tablets that use the architecture but they are still basically in development mode for the time being:
I've got a PinePhone and I really like it so far (although it uses an ARM chip). It's not quite up to par with mainstream phones in all regards, like the camera is kind of crappy and there are some software bugs but to be fair I was aware that it was still in beta when I bought it.
All the components are replaceable, and it even has kill switches for the mic/camera/etc on the back. My favourite part is that it runs KDE.