Indeed, Silicon Valley is where the real battle of the cold war happened. The Soviet Union and China failed to realize how silicon scaling would alter and become a decisive military operation.
If we are talking about cold war era, in 1991 with the end of the cold war with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, China had a lower GDP than North Korea. China wasn’t even capable of being part of the “war” for silicon at this point. China’s GDP has grown x46 since 1991, compared to the US that’s only grown x4.
Once that ball started rolling, it is impossible to catch the front line so long as the design edge is kept a closely guarded secret and the extreme capital required is too high to be viable.
That’s not the case at all, look at Intel it use to be at the bleeding edge and now it is on the brink of bankruptcy. The US isn’t at the forefront of silicon either, maybe for some designs like with Nvidia/AMD but that’s only because until recently GPUs were only used for games. Now they have an actual application for the military and other fields.
The company that makes all of these chips possible is a Dutch company, ASML. Without them nothing would have been possible. They create the very expensive and very large (40 freight containers, 3 cargo planes, and 20 truck loads for 1 machine) tools that are used for creating the microchips. The only benefit that this has on the US is that the Dutch are an ally of the US and are thus required to follow US policy. That is the only thing keeping China from more advanced nodes, the US banning the Dutch from selling their tools to China. Every company that makes the actual nodes TSMC, Samsung, and lastly Intel uses these machines from ASML. Where TSMC is the farthest ahead of any of the other 2, and Intel is by far the farthest behind even Samsung. TSMC also can’t sell their chips to China because of the same reason as the Dutch, Taiwan following US sanctions.
So really the only thing the US has going for it, isn’t some grand lead it had cause some guy from the 1950s apparently made some prediction. It is because of the power it holds over allies in preventing them from providing the same technology the few US companies depend on from other foreign countries. Which given the last 1-2 months the US seems dead set on losing all of these allies.
Still even with worse hardware, with all the sanctions the US has imposed, China was still able to create an AI model on par or better than the US’ best model. They are being forced to innovate instead of just throwing a crap ton of money at more GPUs and brute forcing it.
This is the real reason why your mobile devices are all running orphaned kernels on undocumented hardware.
You should look up LineageOS, you can request the Kernel for any android smartphone as is required by the licensing. I maintained one of the devices for a while, it is not an easy task to keep a device up to date with the latest kernel. The only ones that are really doing it are Intel and AMD, as I imagine there are a ton of x64 servers that run on Linux.
So this is the world that is changing around the issue of RISC-V. It will come into its own in a post VC growth era.
There’s still a lot of problems, RISC-V is an instruction set, and a very limited instruction set that doesn’t include a lot of things. It doesn’t include things like a GPU, or even vector instruction sets. It is very limited and almost everything else around it is going to be proprietary, including the chip design. There isn’t any chip design that is public except for maybe 2 that aren’t even actual designs, they are just theoretical. Cause again it is just the instruction set, it doesn’t include anything else, literally everything else you need like memory controllers, branch prediction, etc are all proprietary. All this does for China really is them having to create their own software on top of the hardware. They can just use Linux, which is more and more supporting RISC-V.
I feel there’s a lot here that is misunderstood…
If we are talking about cold war era, in 1991 with the end of the cold war with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, China had a lower GDP than North Korea. China wasn’t even capable of being part of the “war” for silicon at this point. China’s GDP has grown x46 since 1991, compared to the US that’s only grown x4.
That’s not the case at all, look at Intel it use to be at the bleeding edge and now it is on the brink of bankruptcy. The US isn’t at the forefront of silicon either, maybe for some designs like with Nvidia/AMD but that’s only because until recently GPUs were only used for games. Now they have an actual application for the military and other fields.
The company that makes all of these chips possible is a Dutch company, ASML. Without them nothing would have been possible. They create the very expensive and very large (40 freight containers, 3 cargo planes, and 20 truck loads for 1 machine) tools that are used for creating the microchips. The only benefit that this has on the US is that the Dutch are an ally of the US and are thus required to follow US policy. That is the only thing keeping China from more advanced nodes, the US banning the Dutch from selling their tools to China. Every company that makes the actual nodes TSMC, Samsung, and lastly Intel uses these machines from ASML. Where TSMC is the farthest ahead of any of the other 2, and Intel is by far the farthest behind even Samsung. TSMC also can’t sell their chips to China because of the same reason as the Dutch, Taiwan following US sanctions.
So really the only thing the US has going for it, isn’t some grand lead it had cause some guy from the 1950s apparently made some prediction. It is because of the power it holds over allies in preventing them from providing the same technology the few US companies depend on from other foreign countries. Which given the last 1-2 months the US seems dead set on losing all of these allies.
Still even with worse hardware, with all the sanctions the US has imposed, China was still able to create an AI model on par or better than the US’ best model. They are being forced to innovate instead of just throwing a crap ton of money at more GPUs and brute forcing it.
You should look up LineageOS, you can request the Kernel for any android smartphone as is required by the licensing. I maintained one of the devices for a while, it is not an easy task to keep a device up to date with the latest kernel. The only ones that are really doing it are Intel and AMD, as I imagine there are a ton of x64 servers that run on Linux.
There’s still a lot of problems, RISC-V is an instruction set, and a very limited instruction set that doesn’t include a lot of things. It doesn’t include things like a GPU, or even vector instruction sets. It is very limited and almost everything else around it is going to be proprietary, including the chip design. There isn’t any chip design that is public except for maybe 2 that aren’t even actual designs, they are just theoretical. Cause again it is just the instruction set, it doesn’t include anything else, literally everything else you need like memory controllers, branch prediction, etc are all proprietary. All this does for China really is them having to create their own software on top of the hardware. They can just use Linux, which is more and more supporting RISC-V.