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The Risk of RISC-V: What's Going on at SiFive? (morethanmoore.substack.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Ian Cutress muses upon rumors around SiFive, the forerunner of high-performance RISC-V cores.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago

I don't see it as irrational. You're thinking about it the wrong way round.

Manufacturers buy chips from proven sources, where the chip can be traced back to the fab that made it. The entire system of trust is built on the assumption that the chip designers and fabs are trustworthy and that the shady stuff happens elsewhere in the supply chain.

When the designers can't be trusted, it breaks everything. Up until now it hasn't been a problem except in extremely sensitive areas like military equipment - only governments can force a company to risk everything by compromising their own products. But take the risk away - make it cheap enough to design new microcontrollers - and what's to stop a chip designer from taking money from (for example) the Russian mafia? IoT is huge, everywhere, and Risc-V is ideally suited for it.