Globalization, Open Source and the technology wars

At present, US supremacy in chips technology is somewhat similar to that enjoyed by the British Empire before the Dreadnoughts. After the restriction of export to China and the extension of sanctions to Russia, it seems that US technology will be as protected as military secrets were during the first years of XX Century. In my opinion, globalization and open source may have set the scenario for a new technology race, most probably as ineffective as the Dreadnoughts'. As an example, I will describe a very limited aspect of the chip wars: the competition around the Risc V Instruction set and the related Intellectual Property issues.

A little history - In 1904, Admiral Fisher (then First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty) proposed an innovative type of battleship, but he met a strong opposition from his own organization. They said that disrupting the status quo meant starting a new competition just to re-gain the same technical supremacy they already had. Fisher replied that if they weren′t starting that game somebody else would, so it was better to start it first. The advent of the Dreadnoughts sparked a new arms race which led to thousands of deaths during WWI and WWII. But in the end, when historians compared the Dreadnoughts to other technical innovations, they found them to be singularly ineffective in deciding the outcome of both conflicts.

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As computer software is executed, it requests services to the hardware through the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The ISA describes all the computations that the hardware may perform: clearly, a software targeted at one specific ISA cannot run on any other. ISAs are very valuable pieces of IP, as the result of years of investments, and usually producing hefty licensing fees from hardware producers. For this reason, ISAs are in constant competition, with the newer ones trying to gain market space at the expense of the olders. Most popular ISAs are:?

• the IBM 360 ISA, first introduced by IBM in 1964, and mainly confined to mainframes.
• the x86 ISA, first introduced by Intel in 1978. powering almost all Windows-based computers.
• the Arm ISA, first introduced in 1985, powering smartphones, many consumer appliances and the newer generations of Apple computers.
• the RISC-V ISA, introduced in 2010, and managed from the start by a non-profit association. As it is an open architecture, anyone can leverage it without paying any royalties.

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The ISA is not the only Intellectual Property issue involved in CPU design. Many electronic circuits (the logic) can implement the same ISA delivering different performance levels, as shown by the ongoing competition between Intel and AMD processors. Even the same logic may be operated in different ways by a special low-level program called the microcode. At the very bottom of this technology stack we find the process of building the chips themselves. The combination of different logic, microcode and process enables the same ISA to cover a wide range in performance, power, and cost and to reach different markets from supercomputers to washing machines.

Also, a single chip usually hosts many instances of the same CPU, called cores, capable of simultaneous and coordinated operation.?This technique of distributing a calculation over multiple processors may allow many low-performance cores to achieve the same level of a high-performance one.

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Arm and RISC-V look the easiest bet in supporting the new types of hardware that are continuously introduced on the market. Arm is a more mature technology, delivering better performance but requiring licence fees. RISC-V has more potential, can support a wider range of hardware but is still lagging in performance. As an indication, Arm performance benchmark is set at A78, with best RISC-V implementations reaching A75. However, evaluation should cover cost, ease of production, power consumption and the availability of application software.

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Arm's present owner, Japan-based Softbank Group, has declared it wants the company to go public before the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2023. Details of this IPO, which has been delayed several times, are not known. Whatever the outcome, Arm will be under the control of the US or of a US-friendly nation and may become subject to US trade regulations and restrictions. On the contrary, the RISC-V Foundation was established from the start (2015) as an US-based non-profit corporation. As of March 2020, it was renamed RISC-V International and became a Swiss-based nonprofit business association, somehow out of reach from the longa manus of the US. About 3,100 members worldwide, including companies and academic institutions, are now collaborating to the project. In February 2022, Intel itself announced a $1 billion fund that will, in part, support the development of RISC-V technology. According to the website of the RISC-V International, 13 out of its 25 premier members are from China, including Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei and ZTE.

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As its ISA gained traction in the smartphone market, Arm became a very profitable company. At first, it licensed its technology to other companies and had little interest in quarrelling with them, but then they locked horns with one of their best customers, Qualcomm. Qualcomm bought Nuvia, an Arm-licensed company, claimed they inherited Nuvia's IP, and stopped paying license fees to Arm. Arm didn't agree, but refused to settle and went all-out for a suit, to be decided in 2024. The hidden IP risk in adopting an Arm-based chip started scaring developers and weakened Arm's market position.?Qualcomm proudly reported they had already shipped more than 650 million RISC-V cores. Other reports describe Apple migrating the lower-level functions of its smartphones from Arm to RISC-V.?

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Chinese government entities are all set to take “golden shares” in units of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. The new share structure may allow the Government (and the Party) to have the last word in the decisions of those private companies. As an example, on Jan 4?2023,?an arm of the Cyberspace Administration of China took 1% of an Alibaba digital media subsidiary, according to corporate database Qichacha. A new director (most probably a CAC official) was appointed that same day, in what is looking a prototype for future acquisitions. This move is probably part of a wider design, which I described in my previous post about the red knights of the Internet .

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The Beijing Open Source Chip Research Institute (also known as Kaixin Institute ) was established at the end of 2021.? Last November, the Chinese government onboarded Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent into it, working under China Academy of Science to aid in developing new products based on the RISC-V ISA. As a Tencent engineer stated: "You don't know when the next round of US restrictions will come. Using Arm's architecture is too risky now. It's like exposing your biggest weakness to the enemy," While their RISC-V plans were initially targeted at household appliances, the consortium is now developing high performance chips for Artificial Intelligence and datacenter applications. Its first RISC-V product, named Xiangshan "Fragrant Mountain", rivals existing Arm chips at performance levels A72 and A73.

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The USA extended its restrictions on technology exports to China and sanctioned Russia after its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine: both of them should be denied access to IP developed by US-based and US-friendly technology companies. However, what about the world of open-source??An ethical clause has been proposed that licensed products should not be used in unethical activities, as weapons development, acts of war or personal surveillance. However, the main opinion is that open-source software should be free-flowing, not least because it's simply impossible to track its usage. For example, NASA announced that its Mars expedition is powered from code sourced from as many as 12,000 open source developers. As technology is more and more dependent on open source, the long-term effect of sanction may be lower than the original intention.

Stay tuned for the second part of this issue!