The US has a new plan to corner China: make it more difficult for it to access the latest in RISC-V technology
The RISC-V architecture plays a central role in China’s strategy. This technology is a free hardware alternative to both the x86-64 designs from Intel and AMD and the CPUs with ARM architecture that have proliferated so much in recent years. For the country led by Xi Jinping, it represents the opportunity to sustain its technological development despite the sanctions of the US-led alliance. In fact, the Chinese Government has created a consortium of companies and research institutes that seeks to develop chips with this architecture.
Tencent, Alibaba and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are some of the organizations that are working on the development of processors with RISC-V architecture, and the US Administration is very concerned. It is because this technology can be used to develop extraordinarily capable supercomputers. In fact, Europe already has EPAC ( European Processor ACcelerator ), its first RISC-V chip, ready, and it has precisely been designed to reside inside the next European supercomputers.
What the US wants to control is extremely difficult to control
Marco Rubio and Mark Warner are two of the US senators who are pressuring the Joe Biden Administration to get it to do something regarding the development of the RISC-V architecture . The origin of their concern is the same reason behind the sanctions that the United States has deployed in recent years to stop China’s technological development: the safety of American citizens. The problem for legislators is that, as we have seen a few lines above, RISC-V is a free and open architecture.
The US cannot do anything to prevent China from developing RISC-V technology and manufacturing its own processors with this architecture. It has been doing this for many years, and it will certainly continue regardless of the rules approved by American legislators. Of course, what the Joe Biden Administration can do is limit the contributions that its own companies make to the development of this technology. On paper it may even prevent the knowledge exchange traditionally linked to RISC-V from moving forward. At least as far as the US role is concerned.
This is precisely what Rubio, Warner and other senators are demanding. They do not want China to benefit from the contributions that American companies and research institutions make to the advancement of the RISC-V architecture. Mike Gallagher, the head of the committee that the US Government has created to supervise everything that has to do with China, defends that “the Department of Commerce needs any US person or company to process an export license before collaborating with any entity. China in the field of RISC-V technology.
Furthermore, Michael McCaul, who is the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives, assures that “the Chinese Communist Party is abusing RISC-V technology to circumvent US dominance of the intellectual property that is necessary to make these chips.”
At this juncture, it is very likely that the US Government will finally approve new sanctions expressly designed to prevent its advances in the context of the RISC-V architecture from reaching China , but in all likelihood the Xi Jinping Administration will reinforce its research in this area as It is already doing so in the field of lithography equipment design .