Huawei RISC-V CPUs

Huawei Develops First RISC-V CPU to Overcome ARM Restrictions https://www.tomshardware.com/news/huaweis-hisilicon-develops-first-risc-v-design-to-overcome-arm-restrictions >In a bid to overcome US restrictions on its Arm designs, Huawei's HiSilicon has turned to the open-source RISC-V architecture and has even released its first RISC-V board for Harmony OS developers. Due to being blacklisted by the U.S. government, Huawei and its chip division HiSilicon do not have access to development and production technologies designed in America. The restrictions include many Arm processor architectures, including those used in various microcontrollers that Huawei uses widely. >Overall, the HiSilicon Hi3861 development board has rather vast (at least Raspberry Pi-like) capabilities, but not for a world that Huawei's HiSilicon is used to, at least in terms of public opinion. >When it comes to high-volume products made by Huawei, a non-Arm-based chip makes exceptional sense and also gives the company experience working with an open-source architecture. Only time will tell if the company uses its RISC-V experience to develop other, more powerful devices. 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 https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/iscas_2000_riscv_laptops/ >The Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) is working to build 2,000 laptops using the free and open-source 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, Berkeley, in 2010, RISC-V is an open-source alternative to proprietary processor architectures including Arm and x86. Anyone is free to build chips based on RISC-V, which can themselves be open or closed source, and anyone can modify or extend the architecture as they see fit. >Those freedoms have been of particular interest to China since former US president Donald Trump launched a trade war in 2018 which hit Chinese technology companies with punitive tariffs and outright trade embargoes – including the potential for companies like Huawei to be cut off entirely from the Arm and Intel intellectual property that powers their devices. >The solution: take something like RISC-V and bring the technology in-house, and that's exactly what the nation is doing – starting, but not ending, with Huawei and Alibaba.

interesting, i wanna see how well it runs regular software that has to be translated for the risc instruction set and how energy efficient it is. Good thing for us either way.

>>47636 Americans have a pretty funny habit of creating their enemies, I like it. I wonder whether they're going to drop Windows completely, no reason to run NSA spyware on their chips.

>>47641 Probably. I doubt Windows supports RISC and that means it'll fade out other than for legacy uses.

AHAHAHA imagine being retarded enough to use a CCP spyware chip in your computing device. Enjoy your backdoored CCP-brand """"""RISC-V"""""" device

>>47650 The point was less that this is something you want to buy right now and more that RISC-V is getting a serious push. New architectures are a chicken and egg problem and it looks like Huawei is laying the egg. >>47656 This is a weird and inappropriate thing to say. If it weren't so stupid I would think this is a wumao post. Anyway, it's true that CPC is the official abbreviation but all the Chinese (HK/Taiwan) speakers I've met say CCP. Probably because that's how they've heard it in English. I suspect this is ultimately because the KMT was frequently rendered as the Chinese Nationalist Party. CNP, CCP, kind of has a ring to it. No way it has anything to do with the CCCP, a Cyrillic abbreviation. That's dumb.

Really curious why my post correcting lainon's CIA talking point was deleted.("correcting". It was off-topic, and did not contribute anything meaningful. Reminder that QQ belongs in >>>/q/)

>>47642 If something like RISC-V becomes widespread in tablets and laptops like with ARM, Microsoft will have to support RISC-V like they did with Windows 10 for ARM.

XiangShan open-source 64-bit RISC-V processor to rival Arm Cortex-A76 https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/07/05/xiangshan-open-source-64-bit-risc-v-processor-rival-arm-cortex-a76/ >SiFive Performance P550 was supposed to be the most powerful RISC-V core to date, capable of outperforming Arm’s Cortex-A75 core in raw performance, but especially in terms of efficiency, with three times the performance per mm2. >But there may be an even more powerful RISC-V processor, albeit developed as a research project, with the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS)’s XiangShan open-source processor presented at the recent RISC-V World Conference China 2021 with the goal of matching Cortex-A76 performance. >The current implementation relies on RV64GC RISC-V architecture, includes 2MB cache, PCIe interface, and supports up to 32GB DDR4 memory. The XiangShan processor has been tested with Debian on an FPGA platform, and eventually, it may end up supporting Ubuntu which recently ported to HiFive RISC-V boards. >The RISC-V core has been developed with the Chisel language, which the developers claim requires five times fewer lines of code than Verilog, and much faster to develop with, according to a recent post in Zhihu (in Chinese). You can find the source code released under a Mulan PSL v2 license (Mulan Permissive Software License, Version 2), and some documentation in English and Chinese on Github. https://liliputing.com/2021/07/open-source-xiangshan-risc-v-processor-could-eventually-challenge-arm-cotex-a76.html >It’s also not totally clear whether the XiangShan processor will be commercialized, though the Chinese government has been actively seeking alternatives to x86 and ARM for quite some time. The XiangShan team also sees the processor as “milestone event in the field of Chinese chips and even the world’s chips,” adding that the open source chip could revolutionize “the field of information infrastructure.”

>AHAHAHA imagine being retarded enough to use a CCP spyware chip in your computing device yea ill wait for the white man to implement riscv

>>47650 >AHAHAHA imagine being retarded enough to use a CCP spyware chip in your computing device. Enjoy your backdoored CCP-brand """"""RISC-V"""""" device It's not such a crazy idea for someone in a Five Eyes country who never travels to Commieland. The people who can see what I'm doing have no authority or ability to arrest me, and the people who do have the authority or ability have no access to any hardware backdoors on my device.

>>48214 the absolute state of imageboards

>>47650 >>48214 >In a bid to overcome US restrictions on its Arm designs, Huawei's HiSilicon has turned to the open-source RISC-V architecture >The Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) is working to build 2,000 laptops using the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture Doesn't this mean that they simply can't do shady stuff with the CPUs they have developed? And if they can, how much better is this compared to Arm architectures/Intel CPUs (from a purely technical standpoint)?

>>48249 Chinks have been implementing backdoors in cables and other components even. They can and will do lots of extremely shady stuff, i dont trust the western powers, but atleast their motives and means are known to some extent, the chinese however will do anything to take control. None of this matters, ultimately the efficiency will be dictated by the components and materials used to in the chips. Remember lainon, the cpu is not the only threat vector. And dont underestimate the chinese, they are well know to manipulate international finance and collaborate with actors like google, of which i need to say no more.

>>48249 >Doesn't this mean that they simply can't do shady stuff with the CPUs they have developed? No >And if they can, how much better is this compared to Arm architectures/Intel CPUs (from a purely technical standpoint)? Not much difference at all. With ARM you'd license a core, then add your backdoors and fab it. With RISCV you get the core for free, then add your backdoors and fab it. I suppose it is possible to decap a chip and try to see what they changed, but AFAIK the cores are RTL so the integrator has a lot of latitude for determining layout which means a lot of opportunity to hide whatever they want in there. >>48139 >the Chisel language, which the developers claim requires five times fewer lines of code than Verilog What an absolutely meaningless statistic, but I bet they got some nice attaboys from their overlords. I haven't used Verilog myself but VHDL was atrocious and it doesn't look much better, so I'm glad somebody is working on something new.

>>47650 >AHAHAHA imagine being retarded enough to use a CCP spyware chip in your computing device. Enjoy your backdoored CCP-brand """"""RISC-V"""""" device Of course asking you for evidence of none existing "spyware" would be a waste of time. But hypothetically, you are designing a chip. How would you add "spyware" to the hardware? What would the "spyware" do exactly?

>>48254 Anon, the potential for hardware backdoors is pretty well established. We don't have to wonder if or how it could be done, because we have existing examples. "spyware" is maybe not quite the right word, but that's just sematics. Hardware can do anything software can do (because hardware does everything that software does). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology