I thought the uk blocked the sale on national security grounds.
What is the compelling reason for going for RISC V compared to ARM or x86 when comes to general purpose computing?
I understand Intel wants to communicate that it is taking a direction but it seems to me that we are a long time away from seeing RISC V as the main computing architecture in a consumer laptop or a phone.
ARM is potentially soon owned by an enemy. RISC-V is owned by no one.
Arm64 and riscv64 are pretty close to equivalent in a technical sense for general purpose computing, especially once consumer ARM chips ship with SVE2 and RISC-V with their Vector extension (which are both going to be out at pretty much the same time).
Someone with a lot of money, such as Intel, investing in RISC-V will vastly accelerate RISC-V getting to being able to be used in a high end phone or laptop. Intel has the ability to "do an M1" with RISC-V, leapfrogging ARM.
How fast do you believe Intel could come up with such an M1-level RISC-V CPU?
Doing so, wouldn't they also help create a market where the barrier to entry is much lower than x86, thus inviting more competitors than they have now? It'd be interesting to see Intel on such a warpath against ARM...
They might be able to match it on speed, efficiency, and price, but not on vertical integration. But I'm curious to see how a RISC-V ecosystem might develop once someone starts pumping heavy dollars into it.
The manufacturer with the US government behind (plus political support), since they don’t want to see their country lagging behind in processor manufacturing for strategic reasons.
I believe this will tend to put the right incentives when needed.
> Nationalism and subsidies does not make a sustainable business.
This is not true. Airbus is an early example, and of course we can't forget to mention Huawei, Baidu or Alibaba.
I'd say defense industry as well, but since their customers are governments one may argue that their revenue would dry up when military spending is down
Nationalism/subsidies/protectionism are a valid way to nurture a startup.
But you can definitely grow to a point where that's no longer necessary. That's why people got so terrified of Huawei: it wasn't that they were subsisting only on forced 'buy-domestic' orders from China, it was that they were able to produce products that were competitive enough for overseas customers to willingly buy them.
Its not that they want but politics might drive them toward this way.
I'm pretty sure a lot of Chinese big tech are willing to invest in semi conductor designs to keep more of the profit internally then send it to the US and prevent risk in their supply chains. You also see more and more Chinese big tech companies branch out of China so its not certain that windows and android can easily keep their monopoly.
What is the compelling reason for going for RISC V compared to ARM or x86 when comes to general purpose computing?
I understand Intel wants to communicate that it is taking a direction but it seems to me that we are a long time away from seeing RISC V as the main computing architecture in a consumer laptop or a phone.