NVIDIA’s purchase of ARM is not only Jen-Hsun Huang Company’s entry into the processor market and with it the ability to create totally closed ecosystems. It is also the transfer of ARM to an American company, a world superpower in full technological cold war with China, the other great superpower.
Banning the use of US technology by some Chinese companies could put those that rely on ARM technology, like Huawei’s HiSilicon division, without access to a number of key components for SoCs in their systems.
HiSilicon leaves ARM to adopt RISC-V
HiSilicon is Huawei’s division specializing in creating the company’s SoCs, known for the Kirin line of smartphones. You have just announced the adoption of ISA RISC-V for your future processors, as a precaution against not being able to use the ISA ARM and all the components around it, because ARM not only licenses the instruction set, but also designs entire cores and most of the components that surround them within the SoC.
The announcement was accompanied by the presentation of the HiSilicon Hi3861 development board, which contains a 160 MHz 32-bit RISC-V processor. The specs are at least very low, but they cease to be when you consider that this is a device for IOT products. Hence its low speed, but it is a first step and a declaration of intent for the future of Huawei.
To develop RISC-V based SoCs that are at the ARM level, they will have a great job to do, as much of the ARM licensed intellectual property has prevented the development of pieces of hardware that HiSilicon itself is now going to do. to have. to be developed internally as they are not available for RISC-V.
Will RISC-V replace ARM?
No, not really and the reason is that the ARM application ecosystem is huge and NVIDIA during its presentation at the GTC a few weeks ago confirmed its excellent relations with the various companies in charge of manufacturing ARM processors. Of course, these companies are American and some Japanese and therefore are not on the United States blacklist.
What it can be is that two parallel IT marketplaces will be created over time, one based on ARM and the other based on RISC-V. Both completely incompatible with each other and limited to different geographic areas of the world as a representation of a technological cold war that we are already experiencing today.
