>Being able to block ARM reference designs etc.... has a huge impact on the United States' ability to block China's technological ambitions.
Practically speaking, aren't ARM designs so widely used among the major chip manufacturers that Chinese companies/agencies are likely to have copies of important stuff anyway?
Or does the implementation of ARM designs work somehow more proprietarily (or opaquely?) than just the customers receiving files full of chip designs?
Because I imagine that the prohibition against being able to use ARM is really only meaningful to legal and royalty-paying law-abiding customers. If a rogue agent has the designs already, what's to stop them from using them?
I'd be curious to know how ARM protects the designs from just being copied, or what the mechanism here is. Or maybe their designs are useless without the supporting software, etc. ? ARM's value is the licensing of the designs and that they hold patents/copyrights, not the absolute knowledge of the designs -- is that right? Are their designs themselves that hard to copy?
With it looking like SMIC will be added to the excluded company list I don't think they'd mind producing unlicensed chips. I doubt the Chinese government would ban their sale either.
The Chinese have shown a willingness to do whatever they want within their own market. The question is the global market. Sure they can pirate intellectual property of ARM for their domestic market all they want, but they won't be able to export it and sell it on the global market.
What about updates/extensions? They would have to wait till the spec gets released to the public to bring new compatible functionalities to their chip.
Practically speaking, aren't ARM designs so widely used among the major chip manufacturers that Chinese companies/agencies are likely to have copies of important stuff anyway?
Or does the implementation of ARM designs work somehow more proprietarily (or opaquely?) than just the customers receiving files full of chip designs?
Because I imagine that the prohibition against being able to use ARM is really only meaningful to legal and royalty-paying law-abiding customers. If a rogue agent has the designs already, what's to stop them from using them?
I'd be curious to know how ARM protects the designs from just being copied, or what the mechanism here is. Or maybe their designs are useless without the supporting software, etc. ? ARM's value is the licensing of the designs and that they hold patents/copyrights, not the absolute knowledge of the designs -- is that right? Are their designs themselves that hard to copy?