Chinese Company Developing 64-core RISC-V Chip with Tech from U.S.

The headline is of course confused. The 64 core chips (SG2042, SG2044) use Chinese-developed THead cores. Only the 16 core chip (SG2380) is using SiFive cores.

> RISC-V extensions have compatibility issues, and the company had to develop a new chip to accommodate the final vector extensions, Liuxi told HPCwire.

Liuxi should be more accurate. RVV 0.7 is a draft version with absolutely zero expectation that it will be compatible with the 1.0 version. Freedom to make radical and incompatible changes from draft to draft is the whole point of having draft versions.

> The Chinese company Sophgo started as Sophon in 2016, developing bitcoin mining hardware. Sophgo was established in 2020 and was focused on developing A.I. chips. Sophon and SophGo merged in 2021 and shipped its first CPU, SG2042, in 2022.

If accurate (and this was after all filtered through a reporter), that's the first comprehensive explanation I've seen of the difference between Sophon and SophGo.