Opinion Interviews with chip company CEOs are invariably enlightening. On top of the usual market-related subjects of success and failure, revenues and competition, plans and pitfalls, the highly paid victim knows that there's a large audience of unusually competent critics eager for technical details. That's you.

Take The Register's latest interview with RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond. It moved smartly through the gears on Intel's recent Platinum Membership of the open ISA consortium ("they're not too worried about their x86 business"), the interest from autocratic regimes (roughly "there are no rules, if some come up we'll stick by them"), and what RISC-V's 2022 will look like. Laptops. Thousand-core AI chips. Google hyperscalers. Edge. The plan seems to be to do in five years what took Arm 20.

RISC-V may not be an existential risk to Intel, but Arm had better watch it.

That's a bold claim. Redmond is right to point to serious progress – getting buy-in from the industry is an outstanding achievement. RISC-V has earned its place as a contender, there's a buzz about it, and the ecosystem is building bit by bit.

All this is necessary, but prosperity is still a way away. The processor market is a very strange place, and there's no real sign that RISC-V is packing a killer punch.

The challenge isn't one of technical competence or even of being a genuinely useful concept that does things its competition cannot. Both are true: RISC-V is shipping in numbers as embedded and SoC silicon, and it's the only ISA where designers are free to add or modify architectural features at the ISA level itself. Compared to the gargantuan market advantages of its two rivals, however, these seem like running shoes where jet boots are needed.

Take Arm. In 2021 it licensed nearly 30 billion cores – four for every human alive – and made $2.7 billion. Which proves three things. There's a huge global appetite for advanced mobile and embedded cores, Arm absolutely owns that market's IP, yet that total domination doesn't make much money.

You might think $2.7 billion is a lot of money – and its profit margin is nothing to sneeze at either – but it's only 0.6 percent of the $450 billion worldwide handset revenue, which, given its completely essential nature, is not a large chunk. It's only double the revenue of the other UK chip industry, that of the British potato chip. If there's to be an upheaval of Arm's dominance, it won't be because there's piles of cash on the table.

There is a pile of cash in Intel's $80 billion annual haul, but that's because of the huge chip factories that Intel owns. Not up for grabs. What matters to RISC-V is that Intel has a very similar lock to Arm on its sector's ISA IP. And the ISA IP sectorization is very distinctive.

Intel and Arm are rulers of their own fiefdoms, ones which despite decades of trying to poach from each other have little overlap. Last year's Mac Mini M1 was the first mainstream Arm desktop computer since Acorn gave up the Archimedes fight in the early 1990s. You could write down all the Arm desktop PCs in the intervening decades on the back of a postcard. (No, the Raspberry Pi is not a mainstream desktop PC. We'll get to that later.)

As for Intel-based smartphones, choose that category if it comes up in a quiz. Ten minutes on Google and you'll be the undisputed world champion expert. Neither fiefdom has a runner-up, not even the ISA of the other side. There are no second places in the big processor markets. Incumbent inertia, the decades of momentum in sector tools, knowledge and installed base, combined with massive investment in innovation just to keep either fiefdom at bay, has turned the mainstream CPU market into two monopolies kept honest and energetic by each other. Want to compete with either? Good luck.

For RISC-V to really prosper, it needs its own sector. AI/ML could be one; there are lots of accelerator designs which are nicely heterogeneous and the industry has yet to pick a winner.

IoT? Maybe, but that's no spring chicken. Gaming has gone through its experimental early stages and is locked into high-performance standard architectures. In truth, the big players are well positioned to divide any new sector between them.

Even if a new sector does appear, RISC-V has to have a major enabling factor. Open source doesn't provide enough financial or technical advantage – most OEMs will be licensing cores, just like with Arm, not designing their own. Modern SoCs can add a lot of architectural innovation without changing the ISA.

To be blunt, RISC-V needs price-competitive performance. A month ago, the VisionFive, the first RISC-V SBC, appeared. It's just like the Pi, only bigger, slower, and more expensive. The Pi created its own sector because it was smaller, faster, and much cheaper than its rivals. It was based on a Broadcom SoC, where years of fearsome competition in mobile phone technology will get you that advantage: RISC-V has nothing to leverage.

RISC-V's not going to be a huge success by out-Pi'ing the Pi. But it needs to out-something something, and in a really arresting way. It doesn't much matter what that something is, but without it, RISC-V will always be in second place where there's only room for first. ®

Activision Blizzard is starting collective bargaining with quality-assurance workers at its game studio Raven Software, after they voted in favor of unionizing.

The Californian video-game maker is currently trying to close the $68.7bn acquisition offer from Microsoft, and has promised to fix internal issues amid allegations of a toxic workplace culture that led to gender and race discrimination, as well as sexual harassment of employees.

As Activision attempted to clean up its public image, the biz announced it would lay off 12 workers from Raven Software after a group of employees tried to form a union. Sixty staff members protested, staged a strike for five weeks, and sided with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) to obtain formal recognition. A formal election was held, and a majority voted in favor of unionizing, and now the games biz is ready to talk.

RSA Conference An ambitious project spearheaded by the World Economic Forum (WEF) is working to develop a map of the cybercrime ecosystem using open source information.

The Atlas initiative, whose contributors include Fortinet and Microsoft and other private-sector firms, involves mapping the relationships between criminal groups and their infrastructure with the end goal of helping both industry and the public sector — law enforcement and government agencies — disrupt these nefarious ecosystems.  

This kind of visibility into the connections between the gang members can help security researchers identify vulnerabilities in the criminals' supply chain to develop better mitigation strategies and security controls for their customers. 

Late last month, France's BEA-RI, or Bureau of Investigation and Analysis on industrial risks, issued its technical report on the March 10th, 2021 fire at the OVH datacenter in Strasbourg.

The French report [PDF] and summary [PDF] echo the findings of the Bas-Rhin fire service in March, 2022 that the lack of an automatic fire extinguisher system, the delay of electrical cutoff and the building design contributed to the spread of the blaze.

The BEA-RI findings also hint at a possible cause – a water leak on an inverter – while stating that the cause has not been conclusively determined.

Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.

During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.

Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.

Microsoft has forgotten to renew the certificate for the web page of its Windows Insider software testing program.

Attempting to visit the Windows Insider portal was returning the familiar "Your connection is not private" warning – as if webpages larded with scripts and trackers can truly be called "private." The problem has now been fixed, and someone's no doubt getting an earful.

Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari will attempt to deter visitors from accessing the webpage, but will provide a link for those who ignore the warnings and persist on clicking through to advanced options.

RSA Conference For the first time in over two years the streets of San Francisco have been filled by attendees at the RSA Conference and it seems that the days of physical cons are back on.

The security conference trade has been more cautious than most when it comes to getting conferences back up to speed in the COVID years. Almost all cons were virtual with a very limited hybrid-conference season last year, including DEF CON, where masks were taken seriously. People still wanted to mingle and ShmooCon too went ahead, albeit later than usual in March.

The RSA conference has been going for over 30 years and many security folks love going. There are usually some good talks, it's a chance to meet old friends, and certain pubs host meetups where more constructive work gets done on hard security ideas than a month or so of Zoom calls.

As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale.

For enterprises eager to leverage AI to a competitive advantage, a cheaper, pared-down alternative may be a better fit, especially if it can be tuned to particular industries or domains.

That’s where an emerging set of AI startups hoping to carve out a niche: by building sparse, tailored models that, maybe not as powerful as GPT-3, are good enough for enterprise use cases and run on hardware that ditches expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for commodity DDR.

Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.

In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.

Analysis The European Parliament this week voted to support what is effectively a ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035, and automakers are not happy.

MEPs backed a plenary vote on Wednesday for "zero-emission road mobility by 2035" – essentially meaning no more diesel and gasoline-fueled vehicles on the road.

The ambitious target means the automotive battery industry will have to service a much larger demand over the coming years, and electric carmakers stand to benefit hugely – that is, if they can source the requisite semiconductors and batteries.

Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.

Dubbed Symbiote, the badware instead hijacks the environment variable (LD_PRELOAD) the dynamic linker uses to load a shared object library and soon infects every single running process.

The Intezer/BlackBerry team discovered Symbiote in November 2021, and said it appeared to have been written to target financial institutions in Latin America. Analysis of the Symbiote malware and its behavior suggest it may have been developed in Brazil. 

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