China's ISCAS to build 2,000 RISC-V laptops by the end of 2022 as nation seeks to cut reliance on Arm, Intel chips The Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) is working to build 2,000 laptops using the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture by the end of next year, as the nation looks to reduce its reliance on foreign technology giants like Arm and Intel. First developed at the University of California …
I suspect the intention is to supply these laptops to developers who can then work on porting, testing, and optimizing software for RISC-V. It's much easier to work on stuff on your own PC than on a server via SSH.
Once they've got those issues sorted out, then they could worry about using the RISC-V CPUs in smart phones, tablets, and embedded devices. Servers, desktops, and commercial laptops could then follow.
I've got a Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 which I use to test software. During lockdown this past winter my PC died and I used the Pi 4 as a desktop temporarily for a day until I could get a new part to fix the PC. Running Ubuntu I found it to be quite usable. A RISC-V chip that could match whatever ARM chip is in the Pi 4 would be viable in a low end laptop, provided they had a comparable graphics chip to go with it.
Its much easier to port and test software on a VM running on a remote server.
Making 2000 laptops by the end of some arbitrary astronomical Earth position sounds more like one of those political "we will have x000 tests by the end of Y" sort of statements.
Sad that a mighty communist nation should be so susceptible to grandiose political stunts that so often derail actual technical progress.
Let's assume that both the US and China backdoor their implementations. So long as the processors pass the qualification tests, running the same code the outputs should be the same. We could run dual core in parallel an if there's any discrepancy in logic a fault condition can be flagged. It's improbable that both backdoors or magic packets will be the same...
Where this won't help is with running closed source software that they also consider essential. It's no good having a domestic IT ecosystem where every machine is binary incompatible with the rest of the world's if you sometimes need to run their software (eg CAD, or silicon design tools, big important software for big important jobs).
So they can't achieve full independence without somehow reimplementing the software tools they will still rely on which cannot be got simply by cloning a repo.
They will always be able to purchase a few thousand high end CAE workstations by unofficial means.
But they have a hard time flooding the planet with hundreds of millions of Wintel laptops while Uncle embargoes them.
So they look for one more replacement, after the Loongson thing.
Between OpenRISC, OpenSPARC and OpenPOWER the number of open and royalty-free ISAs is pretty large. OpenRISC even comes with a fully open source reference CPU design, unlike RISC-V.
This article read more like a sponsored piece by SiFive and other RISC-V parties with vested commercial interests.
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