The next generation of cellphone networks won’t just be 5G or 6G—they will be zero g. In April, Lynk Global launched the first direct-to-mobile commercial satellite, and on 15 August a competitor, AST SpaceMobile, confirmed plans to launch an experimental direct-to-mobile satellite of its own in mid-September. Inmarsat and other companies are working on their own low Earth orbit (LEO) cellular solutions as launch prices drop, satellite fabrication methods improve, and telecoms engineers push new network capabilities.
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RISC-V Guns for Raspberry Pi, Legacy Chips
Two hardware makers are planning to offer chips later this year featuring the RISC-V free and open architecture standard, joining the $180 Linux-capable StarFive VisionFive RISC-V board that went on sale in January. In late June, Pine64 said it was designing a single-board computer for the market now dominated by Raspberry Pi, and Xcalibyte and DeepComputing said they would begin shipping RISC-V-based laptops at the end of the summer.
The twelve-year-old RISC-V computer instruction set architecture standard belongs to no one and everyone, giving it unique appeal compared to Intel and ARM chips, which require licensing fees. At the same time, RISC-V’s relative novelty and reduced feature set and support are barriers to more widespread adoption. An open source development effort last year to produce a Linux-capable mini-PC with RISC-V ended in failure. VisionFive was involved in that project, too. Like any new tech ecosystem, software support for RISC-V is more limited than in Raspberry Pi’s robust development community, says independent software engineer Leon Anavi in a review of the VisionFive. That said, he encouraged viewers to join in and contribute to the growing RISC-V community.
“Consumer laptops are not the target of the RISC-V ecosystem. RISC-V is optimized for power consumption.”
—William Li, Counterpoint Research
RISC-V is the fifth generation of so-called “reduced instruction set computers”—hence the acronym—and it is focused on simplicity and power efficiency. When the Internet of Things started to take off, RISC-V’s moment seemed to have come; Huawei has used the standard in wearables since 2018. RISC-V could achieve a 25% market share in the IoT by 2025, Counterpoint Research estimated in late 2021. “Consumer laptops are not the target of the RISC-V ecosystem,” says analyst William Li, the author of of Counterpoint report. “RISC-V is optimized for power consumption.”
That has attracted AI-specific applications and cloud infrastructure ( “RISC-V Dives Into AI”, IEEE Spectrum, April 2022).
The openness of the standard has also attracted markets facing limits to their use of Intel and ARM intellectual property: no government can place sanctions on open chip designs. That has been a concern for Chinese hardware makers since the trade warinitiated by former U.S. President Donald Trump, and may help promote RISC-V sales in the event of restrictions on sales of Intel or ARM tech, wrote Deloitte analysts late last year. Alibaba has already taken some experimental steps in the direction of RISC-V, IEEE Spectrum wrote last year.
Russian hardware makers also began exploring RISC-V, even before the severe round of sanctions other countries placed on it after its 2022 escalation of its war with Ukraine. “In the second half of this year, we will keep track of Chinese and Russian companies to see if they invest in RISC-V and creating their own IP,” says Li.
One Chinese research institute, the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS), set out to build 2,000 RISC-powered laptops for development purposes, according to a July 2021 post by PLCT Lab director Wei Wu. In the PLCT Lab’s roadmap for 2022, Wu writes that the group will focus on enabling Linux and the most commonly used open software, including LibreOffice, for RISC-V laptops.
That is one of the ironies of RISC-V being an open standard: it may gain adoption as trade barriers fragment the global market for chips.
For now, however, the biggest market for RISC-V chips is in the global automotive industry, market research group Semico reported last year on behalf of the RISC-V Internationalindustry group. Semico predicted that RISC-V will continue to gain shares of the automotive market.
The future for chips may in fact be mixed, in a good way: hardware makers can mix RISC-V, ARM, and Intel components in processor packages of their own making. Intel, for one, encourages that on the grounds that customers might end up paying them to build such chips.
And neither legacy chip designer is standing still. Perhaps in response to RISC-V’s customizability, ARM, which while open charges a license fee, has been offering IoT customers more customizable options. “They’re going to try to defend their market share,” Li predicts.
First published by IEEE Spectrum: [html] [pdf].
Fugitive banknote forger ran errands for his elderly neighbours
When the Madrid district of San Blas-Canillejas went into lockdown in 2020, a man who called himself El Lolo, (short for Manuel), offered to shop and do other errands for old ladies confined to their homes.
His neighbourliness made him popular but when his face appeared last week in a list of Spain’s most wanted fugitives, it was a neighbour who gave the police his address. The tip-off led to the arrest of Manuel Bellido Moreno, 46, who was wanted for distributing fake banknotes and had been on the run for more than seven years.
Bellido was arrested in 2014 in the Galician town of Cambados. He was accused, with his wife, of handing out fake currency made by Rafael Velasco, a prolific forger known as “the pharaoh of counterfeit bills”. Velasco faked $3.5 million dollars in $50 and $100 notes, as well as uncut sheets worth another $20 million.
When Bellido was released on remand, however, he vanished. “He was the mastermind, the one who got away,” a police investigator told El País. The investigator said Bellido learnt the dark arts of counterfeiting from Velasco.
A court found Bellido guilty in his absence and sentenced him to nine years. A police investigator suspects him of having produced tens of thousands of fake €50 banknotes.
In San Blas-Canillejas, meanwhile, a new upholsterer moved into a flat on Calle Tapiceria, named after the Spanish for upholstery. Bellido “fixed up furniture, upholstered chairs, put things together and earned some money that way,” according to a former neighbour.
During the pandemic Bellido, who had separated from his wife but lived with his two daughters, offered to run local errands or cook meals for those who could not leave their homes. Regulars at a bar near by told reporters that they saw him as a longstanding member of their community.
Bellido’s popularity was such that neighbours began throwing things at the police when they came to arrest him. Officers had to shelter in an entrance while they waited for back-up, according to local reports. Soon afterwards the man who called himself El Lolo began his jail sentence.
Europe Expands Virtual Borders To Thwart Migrants
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT in the Maltese search-and-rescue zone of the Mediterranean when a rubber boat originating from Libya carrying dozens of migrants encountered a hulking cargo ship from Madeira and a European military aircraft. The ship’s captain stopped the engines, and the aircraft flashed its lights at the rubber boat. But neither the ship nor the aircraft came to the rescue. Instead, Maltese authorities told the ship’s captain to wait for vessels from Malta to pick up the migrants. By the time those boats arrived, three migrants had drowned trying to swim to the idle ship.
Read the rest of this feature at IEEE Spectrum: [html] [pdf].