The Trump administration is working to ban Huawei products from the US market and ban US companies from supplying the Chinese company with software and components. The move will have wide-ranging consequences for Huawei’s smartphone, laptop, and telecom-equipment businesses. For the next 90 days, though, Huawei will be allowed to support those products. The US Department of Commerce (DOC) has granted temporary general export license for 90 days, so while the company is still banned from doing business with most US companies, it is allowed to continue critical product support.
Meanwhile, ARM has also cut ties with Huawei. This story is far, far from over.
China may retaliate by restricting rare earth materials to US companies. This could severely impact various tech manufacturers from producing virtually anything. I would also suspect that China may retaliate against Apple. Apple’s stocks already took a beating on rumors that China may restrict it’s sale in its own market.
Do you think they would shift towards RISC-V?
https://riscv.org/2019/03/eet-china-article-risc-v-brought-to-china-not-a-high-rise-rendering/
Interestingly, perhaps China already owns a fair part of ARM. So how does ARM cutting off ties work?
https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1334001#
There’s too many possibilities. For example, maybe Huawei keep using ARM (which is UK based) but skip anything that originated from US; and nobody really cares because (e.g.) even old smartphone hardware is good enough anyway.
Currently, my prediction is that nothing really changes for 6+ months, Trump doesn’t get re-elected and the trade war ends, then nothing seems to happen for several more years; but during that time Huawei slowly replace anything from US to remove a long-term liability and US based smartphone and networking companies end up with stronger competition and less sales forever.
Mostly; a transition to RISC-V could become a plausible part of a hypothetical long term plan; but currently I don’t think it’s even in the same ballpark (at least not for “performance per watt”).
They already have the MIPS based Loongson CPU, we enough will, I bet they can beat ARM chips, especially since it is now in Japanese SoftBank Group’s hands.