- China has enrolled tech giants Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA and Tencent Holding Ltd TCEHY to support his design efforts Semiconductor chips to reduce their dependency on Softbank Group Corp SFTBF SFTBY-own arm.
- Arm, which is headquartered in the UK but has significant offices in the US, is considered vulnerable to tightening US sanctions, Financial Times reported.
- The Chinese government has formed a consortium of companies and the Beijing Open Source Chip Research Institute to create new intellectual property on chips.
- The group used Arm’s rival Risc-V, an open-source chip design architecture, to develop Xiangshan, a high-performance Risc-V computer processing chip that aims to match Arm’s IP and fuel the development of a Chinese chip design market.
- Before Beijing’s push to pool resources, Chinese tech giants Alibaba and ByteDance had already formed teams using the Risc-V architecture to develop high-performance chips that power AI algorithms and data centers.
- However, the T-Head exec of Alibaba’s chip arm thinks developing Risc-V chips to replace Arm’s existing T-Head is a distant goal as the parent company’s profits plummet.
- ByteDance Ltd said its work is in preliminary stages, while Alibaba said its developability is mainly in the IoT field.
- “You don’t know when the next round of US restrictions will come… Using Arms architecture is too risky now, it’s like showing the enemy your greatest weakness,” said a Tencent engineer.
- According to Arm CEO Rene Haas, Arm has a significant advantage because it offers software alongside its designs and has a community of 50 million developers.
- Intel Corp INTC said Risc-V “has traction in embedded markets and is expected to penetrate IoT, automotive, mobile and data center markets in the next 3-5 years”.
- However, it added that the open-source architecture “is still in its infancy and needs the support of the ecosystem…
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