Arm may cut off the supply of high-end chip design IP to China. How many 'self-developed chips' in China will be left behind?

The U.S.’s export controls on chip technology to China have already affected the British company Arm, which may cause a large number of Chinese chip companies to be unable to obtain chip design authorization from the company in the future.

According to the Financial Times, Arm has concluded that the United States and the United Kingdom will not approve licenses to export technology to China, which will result in some Chinese companies with chip business being unable to operate as usual. Also purchase the most advanced chip design IP from the company.

According to the new export control regulations introduced by the United States in October this year, Chinese companies will not be able to purchase "advanced CPUs and GPUs" from American companies such as AMD, Intel and Nvidia.

Due to the export control rules of the United States and the United Kingdom, and the Wassenaar Arrangement (The Wassenaar Arrangement) for export control of dual-use goods and technologies, Chinese companies are also unable to obtain leading CPUs from Arm. IP License.

The Wassenaar Agreement was established in July 1996 as a voluntary export control system designed to promote greater responsibility among its members in the export of arms and dual-use products.

These advanced CPUs and GPUs include Arm’s Neoverse V series CPU IP, namely Neoverse V1 and Neoverse V2 CPU core IP. These IPs are key to enabling high-performance computing applications, such as the chips used to design supercomputers.

Arm itself does not sell processors. Its main business is to sell IP licensing solutions for chip design. It is the "gatekeeper" for reviewing chip design access. .

The latest U.S. federal export control regulations prohibit the shipment to China of supercomputers with a "volume less than 1178 cubic meters", a performance exceeding "100 FP64 PetaFLOPS", or a performance exceeding "200 FP32 PetaFLOPS" of American technology.

And Arm’s high-end Neoverse V series design is American technology, so its design cannot be licensed to Chinese companies.

It is worth mentioning that Arm’s Neoverse V series design can not only target HPC processors for supercomputers, but can also be used to develop nuclear weapons. Restricted by recent new export control regulations and the Wassenaar Agreement.

The one directly affected by this limitation may be the "Etian 710" processor launched last year.

The 128-core "Etian 710 processor" launched by Alibaba last year caused quite a stir in the CPU field. According to the official performance results published on the industry evaluation website SPEC.org, the chip Becoming the fastest processor on the SPEC CPU 2017 list.

The Yitian 710 processor integrates 128 Arm v9 cores with a running frequency of up to 3.20GHz. Each core has a 1MB level 2 cache and each chip has a 128MB level 3 cache.

The SoC includes eight DDR5-4800 memory channels that provide up to 307.2 GBps of bandwidth, and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes for connecting high-performance solid-state storage, network cards, and other devices .

This chip is used exclusively by Alibaba Cloud, which has developed a proprietary "Panjiu" server specifically for the Etian 710 SoC.

The server can be used for general-purpose and accelerated AI workloads, but for testing the CPU in the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark, Panjiu was used purely as a number-crunching machine.

#Alibaba’s engineers and executives are worried that this cutoff in chip supply may cause Alibaba’s cloud services to fall into a competitive disadvantage.

Arm, which is headquartered in the UK but has a large presence in the United States, is considered vulnerable to US export control measures against China.

Like technology companies around the world, many in China rely heavily on Arm’s designs to make devices from smartphones to servers.

An engineer from Alibaba’s Pingtou Ge department said: “It feels like the West now treats us as second-class people, and even if we have money, they will not sell us good products. ”

This engineer believes that U.S. control is forming a “two-level system.” Neoverse V, released last year, has been used by Amazon in the United States for its most advanced cloud computing chips.

Many Chinese chip engineers resumed work after SoftBank’s $66 billion deal to sell Arm to Nvidia collapsed earlier this year, an executive at a Shenzhen chip design company said Use Arm designs with confidence without worrying that they will be cut off in the future.

This time, when the company was told that it could not purchase Neoverse V1, a high-end chip used to develop cloud computing, it realized that its previous thinking was "too naive", and Arm's this time The decision was clearly "not about money."

Arm's IP is the basis for most chips in the world and is used by most companies developing cutting-edge technologies. Rising tensions between the two countries have forced some Chinese chip companies to consider an increasingly complex open source alternative designed by Arm, known as Risc-V.

An Arm insider revealed that the company is working with Alibaba and other Chinese customers to find cooperation to achieve performance goals while complying with the Wassenaar Agreement and the United States Solutions for the latest export regulations.

Both the U.S. Department of Commerce and Alibaba declined to comment.

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