Nvidia's Arm deal sparks quick backlash in chip industry
Being able to block ARM reference designs from Huawei's HiSilicon and other fabless Chinese semiconductor firms like Rockchip and Allwinner has a huge impact on the United States' ability to block China's technological ambitions.Right now I'm not interesting in having a debate about whether or not that's a good thing, but it would be good to have a realistic and sober discussion about the impact on this acquisition on China's technological ambitions.There have been recent reports that China's leading semiconductor firm (called SMIC) will be added to the Entity List, which will blocks its access to western technology. If true, this effectively scuttles China's attempts to compete with Taiwan's TSMC and reach semiconductor fabrication parity. SMIC's ambitions heavily rely on freely accessing US-aligned technology: specifically lithography equipment from the Netherlands-based ASML and engineers poached from Taiwan's world-leading semiconductor manufacturing firms.On the x86 front, when AMD was desperate for cash a few years ago they setup joint ventures with China (THATIC and Hygon) and were transferring AMD's then current-generation Zen 1 architecture to China. Further transfer has also been blocked via the Entity List. It's also worth noting that AMD is in a much better financial position after the success of their Ryzen product line, so has less need to make difficult trade-offs by transferring their current-generation technology in exchange for short-term cash injections, so it seems very unlikely they will applying for an export license.At this point, if I was China, I would invest heavily in RISC-V based cores, and openly release highly competitive designs.