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Comment by sipos | Hacker News Reader

> how is ARM China going to continue innovating? On their own?

Yes. Thery may do badly, but this isn't going to be much of a problem for China for ages. They are unlikely to do that badly though - among 2 billion people there will be plenty of good people.

Their much bigger problem though is their lack of access to cutting edge semi-conductor manufacturing technology. I imagine they are on this though, probably through industrial espionage (invading Taiwan would help, but they will face similar issues for acccess to tech long term unless they also get access to ASML work I think).

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SMIC is already at 14nm, and ASML is allowed to continue to sell equipment for this process. The more advanced process nodes have several drawbacks; the domestic market could likely adjust to 14nm long-term.

The MIPS processor was copied for production in China (illicitly, until fully licensed), as was the DEC Alpha. There is significant processor design knowledge, and ample ability to copy any new designs produced by ARM-UK, even if they have to be scaled up to 14nm for domestic production.

Oddly enough, I learned recently that Russia prefers SPARC (known as Elbrus).

Elbrus are not SPARC. They are developed by Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies(MCST) though, that's where your confusion comes from(and there were few SPARC machines under Elbrus brand, but that was a long time ago). They were basically design team for hire in the 90s and were named such to attract customers. Then Intel wanted to acquire them in mid-2000s, but ended up just hiring almost everyone and leaving company as an empty shell. Now they are doing their own ISA and it's very different from SPARC. For starters, they are the only ones who are doing VLIW in CPUs nowadays(outside of CPUs I can think of only one other company, Groq).

Thanks, I just saw their association with SPARC from 1993 to 2010, so I assumed it was their main architecture.

On the subject of VLIW, Sophie Wilson was talking up Firepath as late as 2020.

"In 1992 a spin-off company Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST) was created and continued development, using the "Elbrus" moniker as a brand for all computer systems developed by the company."

"Elbrus-90micro (1998–2010) is a computer line based on SPARC instruction set architecture (ISA) microprocessors."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_(computer)

Elbrus is a custom VLIW, not a Sparc.

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