Comment by fork-bomber
17 hours ago
A large motivation for this move is likely to ensure that attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V are stymied.
There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.
Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Ethernet, although not directly relevant, is a similar example. You can't lobby the US government to outright ban or generally slow the adoption of Ethernet because it's so much of a universal phenomenon by virtue of it being a standard.
Then, there's NASA, and their rad hard HPSC RISC-V. It's a product now, with a Microchip part number (PIC64-HPSC1000-RH) and a second source (SiFive, apparently.) I suppose it's conceivable the a Berkeley CA developed ISA that has been officially adopted as new rad hard avionics CPU platform by the US government's primary aerospace arm could get voted off the island in some timeline, but it's looking fairly improbable at this point.
But yeah, the ISO standard doesn't hurt.
For anyone else who thought this was simply a rad chip, it's radiation hardened
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/pic64-hpsc1000
Only time will tell if it ends like: "to avoid someone else shooting us, let's shoot ourselves".
Dedicated consortiums like CNCF, USB Implementers Forum, Alliance for Open Media, IETF, etc are more qualified at moving a standard forward, than ISO or government bodies.
> There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.
> Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Why do you think that would help? I fail to see how that would help.
An ISO standard is hard to gepolitically regulate, I would think.
It also cements the fact that the technology being standardized is simply too fundamental and likely ubiquitous for folks to worry about it being turned into a strategic weapon.
Taking the previously mentioned ethernet example (not a perfect one I should accentuate again): why bother with blocking it's uptake when it is too fundamentally useful and enabling for a whole bunch of other innovation that builds on top.
> attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V
Is this real? Or FUD?
>> > attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V
>> Is this real? Or FUD?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/20/risc-v-dese...
Somebody trying to influence Washington seems to want it shut down.
> https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/20/risc-v-dese...
From the article:
> The risks aren’t theoretical. A new report found that DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, has been responsible for producing malicious code in roughly half the sensitive cybersecurity incidents analyzed on GitHub. If China is willing to leverage open software in ways that harm global security, why would we assume open-source hardware will be treated differently?
> A single compromised RISC-V chip in a power grid, data center or weapons system could hand Beijing a quiet path into critical infrastructure. The more these chips spread, the greater the odds a vulnerability becomes a weapon.
I think the concern here is more with the implementations (coming out of China) than the instruction set itself. Or perhaps if there is some Verilog/VHDL code out there with backdoors, and that then gets baked into chips.
Thanks. That's exactly the kind of subliminal lobbying that I was alluding to. I don't think it's FUD at all.