The situation around Huawei is reminiscent of an iron grip on the throat, followed by suffocation and death. With Huawei, contrary to economically justified logic, American and other companies both in the software sector and on the part of hardware suppliers have refused and will continue to refuse to work. Will it come to a complete rupture of relations with the United States? With a high degree of probability it can be expected that this will not happen. One way or another, over time, the situation will be resolved to mutual satisfaction. In the end, similar pressure on ZTE eventually faded away, and she continues, as before, to work with American partners. But if the worst happens and Huawei is completely denied access to ARM and x86 architectures, what options are left for this Chinese smartphone maker?
According to our colleagues from the site , Huawei can turn to two open architectures: MIPS and RISC-V. The RISC-V architecture and instruction set were open from the start, while MIPS became partially since the end of last year. Interestingly, MIPS failed to compete with the ARM architecture. That's what Imagination Technologies tried to do before Apple pushed it into bankruptcy. The MIPS architecture has some potential and complete toolkits for SoC design and microcode creation (only 32-bit instructions are open so far). Finally, the same Chinese, represented by Godson computing cores on MIPS, created quite interesting Loongson processors. These are products that have been ready for a long time and are involved in Chinese import substitution, which are actively used in equipment for Chinese government and military structures, as well as for the release of electronics and computers to the local market.
The RISC-V architecture and instruction set is still a dark horse. However, in the last three years, there has been a steady interest in it. And not only little-known developers, but also such , as veterans of the former Transmeta company and not only. For example, Western Digital is also betting on RISC-V. At the same time, in China, interest in RISC-V has not yet emerged, or it is vanishingly small. But this is fixable. Sanctions can significantly increase the degree of interest in anything. This is also a kind of progress engine. In any case, whether it's Huawei's interest in MIPS or RISC-V, it can take up to five years to develop and debug SoCs on these architectures. Chinese MIPS specialists can obviously speed up the development process (SoCs based on Godson cores already exist and are being released), but even these perfect solutions are unlikely to compete on equal terms with ARM.
In addition to developing the architecture, Huawei will have to create its own operating system. She allegedly already conducts such development and promises to complete it soon. But it is unlikely that the combination of a new OS and a new architecture will immediately come out one that will not cause rejection among the mass user. Huawei has a titanic work to do in order to make its complete and convenient product for the average person. If she does this, then a company will appear on Earth that will become a fusion of Google and ARM. The probability of this is quite small, but there is a chance for it. If the sanctions do not kill Huawei, then Huawei itself will eventually be able to seriously oust both Google and ARM. However, we repeat, in our opinion, the likelihood of the conflict escalating to the complete and final isolation of Huawei is rather small.
Source: 3dnews.ru