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Comment by wyuenho | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the level playing field? China doesn't invest and open source anything, why should the US subsidize their technological advancement?

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Literally every open source RISC-V Chip, SoC and Board I know are Chinese, aside from SiFive. Alibaba T-Head Xuantie C9-series and E9-series CPU cores, StarFive JH7110 SoC, Alibaba T-Head TH1520 SoC, SOPHON SG2042 SoC, StarFive JH8100 SoC (TBA), several RISC-V boards from Milk-V, BananaPi and SiPeed which are state of the art RISC-V boards.

I think US are the ones doing less.

Edit: Just realized SiFive was US based, not Chinese, so edited it out.

And the Chinese says thank you Uncle Sam for giving us RISC-V for free.

An open source ISA is a collaborative effort, and it contains several members, not just from the US. And it was inevitable either way. Going against who uses an open source an open source ISA is against open source, and going against open source is capitalist greed.

I won't be debating that, there are plenty of resources to read on it and it's a big topic if you are so deeply opposed to it.

I thought SiFive is actually one of the best though?

Espressif has a bunch of Risc-V designs too. Not high performance but easy to find and use.

Yes, but I'm only talking about Chinese ones here. And considering just the open source boards, as I did, SiFive only has their Freedom series chips and boards, and their contributions to the Rocket Chip project.

All the Chinese ones I listed are open source designs.

The C910 is one of the most popular RISC-V processor designs and it is open source and from China.

And even if you hate China, it does not justify the opposition to using an open source ISA as a whole. It benefits everyone around the globe, and USA is not a special country. Others can use the ISA just the same, and it's better for them to do so.

You guys thinking in terms of countries is just as big of a problem, but again I don't have the time for that philosophy.

> China doesn't invest and open source anything

I actually wrote a blog on that (2019)

https://blog.est.im/201906/stdout-003

Let me know when you have an example of an open source Chinese industry standard, essentially subsidized by the Chinese government. The only example I can think of is Beidou, which nobody uses.

> an open source Chinese industry standard, essentially subsidized by the Chinese government

Hey I do have an example: Richard Stallman's only computer is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Not exactly a well-organized open source community but it's there https://github.com/loongson-community/

A modern one is https://www.openatom.org/ not many popular projects though but it's state-funded.

> Beidou, which nobody uses.

except iPhone 11/12/13/14/15 (with the XMM 7660 chip) and every Android phone using Qualcomm iZat chip (shipped with almost every Snapdragon processor since 2013)

And it's not "open-source" per se, Beidou is just some kind of satellite signal that happens to be compatible with GNSS protocol, so chip makers and make few tweaks to provide location service.

iPhone since 12 has not used the Intel modem, and while newer iPhones supports Beidou, it’s not clear which chip supports it and whether it is used outside of China, or even iPhones sold outside of China has support for Beidou. Even if it does, its civilian frequency only has a 10 meter accuracy outside of APAC, so it’s not clear to me it is used globally in the sense that GPS is.

Also, Loongson and OpenATOM lol. Are they industry standards?

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