I think it's a national capability to do things move - probably sharpened by the realization (in the middle of the pandemic) that not everyone was a friend of the UK and would quite happily watch us drown while sitting round singing songs about how many lifebelts they had.

I'm sceptical about that - we don't own much technology IP and we're hugely reliant on the US already.

I think it's a much more specific security issue.

I think that the capability to design a modern CPU is pretty essential for future defence independence. I think that ARM represents a good chunk of the UKs claim to be able to do that. If the UK wants a share of future US programs of all sorts then it needs to be able to make these claims - or face must less generous terms.

What's the point of being able to design CPUs if we can't make them? We certainly don't have defence independence at all.

I'm not sure about the second point but it seems premised on withholding IP from US which seems unlikely.

Much more likely that there is intense collaboration between say GCHQ and Arm (maybe both ways -> GCHQ gets to understand modern CPU security issues from Arm and Arm benefits from GCHQ input on threats). If that relationship swaps to NSA then there would be real damage to UK security apparatus.

We get our panties in a bunch (and I do too) about the real high end fabs for CPUs, but push-come-to-shove there _are_ fabs in the UK.

Infineon (German owned) and Nexperia (Dutch owned) both own fabrication plants in the UK, so it's possible to scale that up if we were at war, the knowledge is here.

Fair comment but no one is suggesting that we'll lose access to CPU designs that work on older nodes so the point still doesn't really stack up.

> What's the point of being able to design CPUs if we can't make them? We certainly don't have defence independence at all.

If you needed them for defence I'm sure you could set up a fab on older process nodes fairly fast. A tank consumes and generates so much power for moving that it doesn't matter if the CPUs in it will last only 2 hours in a cell phone...

Being dependent on the US turns out to be not a great strategic scenario in this decade.

(Speaking as a Canadian who has watched 30 years of continental economic integration and heard lots of friendly talk since the campaign for the 1988 Free Trade Agreement but now back of the line waiting for vaccines imported from Europe because the US won't export to us and our domestic manufacturing was sold off decades ago because of said continental integration.)

Also the US itself has used the "national security" excuse for trade issues multiple times over the last few years where it was seemingly not the case (steel & aluminum trade disputes, etc). So the precedent has been set. And there's little sign of Biden really doing much to reverse that.

Well, ok, but if you are going to go that route you also have to note that the US pays for your national defense as well to be balanced.

That said, what Trump pulled with steel and aluminum is BS.

National defense so we can defend ourselves from opponents that the US created, or act as an imperial arm for American interests?

Seem to recall some very agitated US commentators bashing Canada when we chose not to enter the second war in Iraq. How's that working out for you, BTW?

And it's time we all stopped being that dependent on the US, considering how unreliable and untrustworthy they are.

You think espionnage, I think a key IP asset.

ARM is a piece of infrastructure now, and dangerous in the hands of NVidia for other reasons than spying. Mostly economical. And yes, that's also national security.

Actually I don't think espionage primarily - more cyber defense against bad actors both state and private.

How about more basic things:

From now on, every ARM processor costs $40 per chip to license. Except, of course, those made by NVidia.

or

From now on, all improvements to the reference ARM architecture will only be available in NVidia chips for the first two years. Afterwards they'll be available for licensing at the current costs.

Those are monopoly issues. And now a national security issue:

From now on, $RANDOM_EUROPEAN_COUNTRY is under embargo wrt to US intellectual property. NVidia being an US company, that includes ARM reference designs. Basically what happened to Huawei with the OS, except now it includes the CPUs too.

And I could go on...

Which is why there are distinct competition investigations going on in UK, EU and elsewhere.

I think you're overdoing the last point: there is lots of key technology licensed from US firms and no-one in the UK thinks that this is a major national security issue.

Much more likely that there is a specific issue that UK government has identified that poses a realistic problem for UK security services.

> no-one in the UK thinks that this is a major national security issue.

"says" yes... "thinks"... you don't know. I would think it if i were them.

" no-one in the UK thinks that this is a major national security issue."

Citation needed

All the more reason to dump funding into RISC-V and drop ARM. CPU architectures and instruction sets shouldn't be in the private hands.

Who owns the RISC-V IP now? There may be lots of open source projects but I don't think the IP is in the public domain, is it?

UC Berkeley.

Insofar as ISAs matter for performance, RISCV is not as good as ARMv8 since the designers are too academic, but it might be good enough.

The current silicon chip shortage is showing just how dependent we are on chips, and while Arm doesn't have their own fabs, they are an important part of that ecosystem. There's a good chance that the current drought may play a role in US decisions on dealing with the China/Taiwan issue, if China shows aggression there is now a clear national security incentive for the US (and other countries, for that matter) to intervene and protect Taiwan, just like they did with oil for the last 40 years.

given that, it's entirely reasonable that the UK doesn't want ARM gutted and the IP shipped out of the country.

IP is important, but manufacturer can just use stolen/expired IP in emergency situation, meanwhile fabs can't be stolen.