RISC-V - Interconnected

Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Semiconductor Edition

Three months after Softbank announced its acquisition of Arm in 2016, Masa Son (founder and CEO of Softbank) invited Jensen Huang (founder and CEO of Nvidia) for dinner at his California mansion. Just the two of them. Among the many things they talked about

Topics: Semiconductor• RISC-V• Open Source•

Semiconductor Design Consolidation: MIPS -> RISC-V

Consolidation in the semiconductor industry continues. The latest event is MIPS Technologies embracing the open source instruction-set architecture (ISA), RISC-V, and no longer designing for the MIPS architecture that gave birth to the company more than three decades ago. While this news, reported in

Topics: Alibaba• Tencent• Antitrust•

January 24, 2021: AliPay & WeChat Pay Breaking Up? AWS forks Elasticsearch

Hello Interconnected Readers: After arriving in Mexico City earlier this week, the four-hour time difference between Mexico and Hawaii is giving me a surprisingly bad jet lag, so I will spare you my usual personal letter. Let’s go straight to the news and

Topics: Open Source• Semiconductor• RISC-V•

Some Bearish Thoughts on RISC-V

I have been a supporter, if not an outright cheerleader, of RISC-V, the open source instruction set architecture (ISA). In my writings here on Interconnected and elsewhere, I’ve often used RISC-V as an example of technological innovation, broadly, and an antidote to countries

Topics: Semiconductor• China• CFIUS•

When "Jurassic Park" Goes to China

I spent last week in the French Polynesian islands for a quick vacation. One of my favorite moments there was approaching the magnificent landscape of Moorea on a ferry, because it reminded me of one of my favorite movies growing up -- Jurassic Park.

Topics: Tesla• RISC-V• TSMC•

September 20, 2020: Unreliable Entity List, RISC-V, TSMC, Tesla in China

This issue covers the period between September 14 - September 20, 2020 with six news stories – three from English language sources, three from Chinese language sources. Disclaimer: all translated article titles are done by me, not official translations from the media outlets. Before you

Topics: Oracle• ByteDance• Regulation•

Era of Regulatory Grift: TikTok-Oracle, NXP-Qualcomm, Arm-Nvidia

The dictionary definition of the word “grift” is as follows: “to acquire money or property illicitly”. It may be a strong word, but also more or less encapsulates the regulatory ethos that’s governing cross-border technology businesses these days. The TikTok-Oracle deal flaunts this

Topics: RISC-V• China• Open Source•

RISC-V, China, Nightingales

Last weekend, I read a long, epic piece of techlore that chronicled the fierce and bitter rivalry between TSMC and Samsung in their fight to become the world’s number 1 chip foundry, which stretched back three decades and continues today. Among the many

Topics: Open Source• China• RISC-V•

Open Source in China: The Trends

This is the third and last part of my multi-part series exploring “open source in China”. If you missed the two earlier posts, I’d strongly recommend you read them first to build some context. (Part I, Part II) In this post, I’ll