UK-based chipmaker ARM tells staff to stop working with Huawei

[WYP]

ARM, a UK-based company may be affected by the US' Huawei ban.



Read more about ARM telling their staff to stop working with Huawei.

 

[grec]

I wouldn't say finished, but definitely heavily delayed. Lets not forget many of the academics & employees who pioneered ARM are now tantalisingly close(Final designs this year) to completing the first full RISC-V SoC, a fully open source, high security, high speed complete multimedia SoC for low cost computing devices and smartphones, from the non-profit lowRISC. It is likely that the raspberry Pi, which is pioneered by many of the same people, will switch to lowRISC now they've firmly ended this extended generation of Pi devices. (China already has a large RISC-V consortium due to the risks of proprietary architectures and HiSilicon have shown increasing interest).

Always worth remembering that major technological progress has to come through cooperation(Modern tech is too complex for any single entity to have created entirely themselves, SoC design work is like building a major city from sand and clay, no single civil engineering entity could carry out such a feat), which more or less guarantees it comes from academia or non-profits. Private companies goals are almost always to convert these technologies into a monetizable form and fully packaged product, or to modify them for further commercial appeal, not to create them (With "cutting edge" tech that is), so there's only so much "knocking down" that can be done when it comes to IP.

 

[meuvoy]

I wouldn't say finished, but definitely heavily delayed. Lets not forget many of the academics & employees who pioneered ARM are now tantalisingly close(Final designs this year) to completing the first full RISC-V SoC, a fully open source, high security, high speed complete multimedia SoC for low cost computing devices and smartphones, from the non-profit lowRISC. It is likely that the raspberry Pi, which is pioneered by many of the same people, will switch to lowRISC now they've firmly ended this extended generation of Pi devices. (China already has a large RISC-V consortium due to the risks of proprietary architectures and HiSilicon have shown increasing interest).

I wouldn't go so far to say they will quickly replace ARM with RISC V while achieving similar performance.

They will most likely die beforce they can even launch a single RISCV powered smartphone and even if they manage to get it working so fast I doubt they will be able to reach modern ARM speeds or efficiency. It should take years untill RISCV can really compete with ARM in the consumer market if it ever will. No I'd say RSCV is one of the most important if not the most important processor architecture for small devices that operate under a fixed firmware like routers, AV receivers/processors, DSPs, controllers, etc. those don't need a lot of speed but they do need to be cheap and not having to pay licensing fees, royalties or wathever should greatly reduce costs of those devices.

Don't forget there's no such operating system designed to work with RISC-V yet. They need to sort this out if they want to make something like a smartphone or a tablet.

 

[grec]

Don't forget there's no such operating system designed to work with RISC-V yet. They need to sort this out if they want to make something like a smartphone or a tablet.

Debian works with RISC-V.... Over 85% or 20,000 packages are already ported. Lots of other Linux OS ports coming thick and fast too. RISC-V software wise is already better supported than a whole swath of other architectures (Grey line).
https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-ports-week.png

For sure this won't be winning performance crowns for a long time, but it will work(Eventually), which is what they need to survive in their key markets. Necessity is the mother of invention though, and until now there was no necessity to avoid ARMdroid.