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 across borders.
  • onoOPEnglish
    41•2 years ago

    The important thing about RISC-V is that it’s a completely open CPU architecture that could be competitive with ARM. It’s arguably the best chance we have at performant computing hardware that doesn’t spy on us or become useless after just a few years. We need this.

    Blocking its development would be a big win for certain corporations, and a loss to basically everyone else. The AutoTL;DR bot didn’t capture that side of the issue, but a quote in the article does allude to it:

    “It would be like banning us from working on the internet,” Kang said. “It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created.”

    • Coffee Junky ❤️
      3•2 years ago

      Not only that, taking action against open source for “national security” is definitely a road we should not go on! It’s not that far away from Microsoft claiming Linux is going to give China an unfair advantage.

    • The DoctorEnglish
      3•2 years ago

      Yep. I’m close enough to DC right now that I could call up a few colleagues and ask who’s tugging on elbows and putting envelopes on tables at lunch lately.