The U.S. Department of Commerce is investigating the risks of China's access to the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) for processors, Reuters reports, heeding calls from lawmakers.
RISC-V (pronounced risk-five) is an ISA, a software instruction standard that tells processors how to receive instructions (e.g. x86 and ARM). RISC-V's low complexity is easier to work with than x86, and is a fully open standard — unlike Arm, its primary competitor. While not popular in mainstream computing products, the standard has a high potential for most processor use cases, concerning U.S. lawmakers attempting to limit China's access to advanced computing power in the ongoing trade war over tech.
