Washington has spent the past decade working to secure choke points of the semiconductor industry: fabrication plants, lithography equipment, advanced packaging, critical minerals and the handful of companies that dominate each. Now a new choke point has emerged in part of the industry that policymakers have barely considered: the instruction set architecture, or ISA.
ISAs are the language through which software tells a chip’s processor what to do, such as perform calculations, move data or execute commands in a program. For more than two decades, two ISAs have dominated mainstream computing: x86, which powers most personal computers and servers, and Arm, which dominates smartphones and is expanding into cars, defense systems and artificial intelligence. The two operate through different business models: x86 is used almost exclusively by Intel and AMD, while Arm historically has licensed its technology broadly to other chip designers.