China Blocks Use of Intel and AMD Chips in Government Computers (cnbc.com) 88
China has introduced new guidelines that will mean US microprocessors from Intel and AMD are phased out of government PCs and servers [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; non-paywalled source], as Beijing ramps up a campaign to replace foreign technology with homegrown solutions. From a report: The stricter government procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft's Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options. It runs alongside a parallel localisation drive under way in state-owned enterprises. The latest purchasing rules represent China's most significant step yet to build up domestic substitutes for foreign technology and echo moves in the US as tensions increase between the two countries. Washington has imposed sanctions on a growing number of Chinese companies on national security grounds, legislated to encourage more tech to be produced in the US and blocked exports of advanced chips and related tools to China.
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Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a direct response to actions in the US. Not just new export restrictions but also incentives for Intel to build a facility domestically. And similar blocks in the US on blocking imports of 5G equipment.
This is a cold war and one of the main messages is propaganda, but also China knows that their homegrown competition won't survive with an inferior product unless they directly hand a customer base to them
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China is making a big push on RISC-V.
Perhaps 2024 will be the year of RISC-V on the desktop.
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Meanwhile, Intel's Horse Creek is still vapourware...
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You mean like economic protectionist retaliation?
....so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? 90% of what China does is for appearances.
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Who cares?
Intel and AMD care. Depending on how far the ban goes the Chinese government including state owned enterprises employs over 50 million people. That's a lot of sales.
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Intel probably cares that this will affect sales in one of the biggest markets.
AMD might not be so worried because they licence some designs. Chinese companies produce versions of AMD parts domestically, with certain parts like the random number generator replaced by their own.
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Both of them should care, because this enables China's home grown industry to develop. It may be inferior, but it's usable, better than we had (I estimate) 15 years ago. If it's allowed to grow, Intel and AMD will have real competition.
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China says 2030 is the target date for reaching full equivalence/substitutability using only 100% domestically owned IP.
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Because China does have a reserve of people and resources that is has been willing to do mid term gains at the sacrifice of the long term (see one child policy, closed finance system, capital controls, IP theft, protectionism in general, etc.)
So what the US is afraid of is the nation state version of pump and dump. The suck all the money up from the world, then leave everyone hanging. They are basically like an abusive husband who happens to control the checking out, so they don't beat you, they just smile
Globalism had a good run (Score:2)
Personally, I'm gonna miss the cheap TVs the most. Not going to miss the made in China ibuprofen or the oddly hypocritical made in China pride shirts [postimg.cc], though.
Re: Globalism had a good run (Score:1)
What about the even more hypocritical patriotic kitsch? Shitty little plastic American flags made in China? We're gonna miss those!
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Personally, I'm gonna miss the cheap TVs the most. Not going to miss the made in China ibuprofen or the oddly hypocritical made in China pride shirts [postimg.cc], though.
Don't worry, America just needs to go and "invest" in a new developing market where labour is unregulated, paid in peanuts, and can be put to work making cheap TVs, ibuprofen, and hypocritical pride shirts.
Re:Globalism had a good run (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry, America just needs to go and "invest" in a new developing market where labour is unregulated, paid in peanuts, and can be put to work making cheap TVs, ibuprofen, and hypocritical pride shirts.
Electronics are moving to Vietnam. Textiles are moving to Bangladesh. The rest is moving to Africa.
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No, they just build it all, and then find out they are totally dependent on either Chinese expertise, or Chinese suppliers to keep everything running, which of course they can't afford (on top of the debt they used to build it in the first place). Then again, China is learning the hard way WHY the IMF and World Bank do what they do, that if you don't, you get burned. So China is increasingly having to just write up billions in debt.
Kenya and co are about to change their tune to "Every time China visits, we
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in a new developing market where labour is unregulated, paid in peanuts, and can be put to work
Where do you have in mind? A lot of the places on might consider are either a.) involved in the Russia/Ukraine war, b.) already being exploited (by China, ironically,) or too small or otherwise unworkable. It's not as if the planet has an endless supply of exploitable workforces just sitting around, waiting for the US to evacuate more of its industrial base to.
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Funny thing is, the question arises: Where? Especially once you realize that the Chinese are now wealthy enough and their labor expensive enough to want to outsource as well.
China worked for a while because it was reasonably stable and had a huge population despite depressed economic levels.
At 1.4B, it has more population than Africa, 1.2B.
And Africa, at least regions of it, still suffers from instability.
Mind you, I don't view running out of people willing to work for peanuts to be a bad thing.
to be replaced by unlicensed golden dragon X64 cpu (Score:5, Interesting)
to be replaced by unlicensed golden dragon X64 cpus that run the same code and don't have an IP licensed but it's china so amd and intel will need to sue in an court in china where they will not win.
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to be replaced by unlicensed golden dragon X64 cpus that run the same code and don't have an IP licensed but it's china so amd and intel will need to sue in an court in china where they will not win.
Complete with Golden Shower liquid CPU coolers?
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Once SMIC gets some reasonable parity with TSMC, I can see this happening. However, even Centaur/Zhaoxin CPUs were based on TSMC's process nodes, and it takes some work to change a CPU, layout, floorplan, and other design stuff to go from one to another.
Where China might be able to get parity is in on other ISAs. RISC-V, China has done a ton of work, and they are cranking out some pretty fast, full-features SBCs, even with a backlevel Linux kernel and antediluvian SoC drivers. Since RISC-V isn't really p
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Overall, x86/amd64 is a dead end. Hell, even Intel has made a paper on moving to a simplified architecture.
That paper says classic x86, not amd64 is a dead end. The idea is to remove all 16 bit modes and all 32 bit modes except for ring 3. So you need a 64 bit kernel, but you can still run 32 bit programs at full speed.
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They have a licence for x86. I forget the exact chain of owners, but Via have one and at least one other company.
There is also various companies with licences for ARM and MIPS, and of course RISC V is free.
No need to stick with x86 if they are ditching Windows as well.
x86 is irrelevant today. (Score:2)
x86 is irrelevant today.
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The licences cover AMD64 as well. Via had their own implementation.
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If this golden dragon thingy does away with the Intel IME/AMD PSP spychip crap, then I personally am definitely interested in getting it.
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You do realize it'll be replaced with Chinese spycrap...right?
Meanwhile, we have Hygon and Zhaoxin processors (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, we have Hygon "HygonGenuine" and Zhaoxin " Shanghai " processors, both licensed for use in China by AMD and VIA, respectively.
In case you missed it, Hygon is the AMD license and is producing AMD processors in China.
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After Centaur got turfed, Zhaoxin does have the Via-based descendent chips, but all the engineers that made and taped those CPUs out are at Intel. I'm sure China has some top tier CPU engineers who can try to pick off where the Centaur people left off and do stuff (and they have, if one looked at the Zhaoxin CPUs), but that, at best, is just an evolutionary architecture that will give diminishing returns in several generations.
RISC-V, or perhaps ARM is where they will go long-term.
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Loongson is still a MIPS derivative, not "indigenous" as they like to call it.
At least it's multicore now, so there's that.
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I'm curious how many of the original Cyrix engineers are still working and are they also at Intel or are they at VIA?
The internal competition between Cyrix and Centaur around the time of the VIA acquisition would be a good book to read.
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VIA owns the Centaur brand and IP, but there is nothing there right now. No development. It is just set aside.
Intel bought out all the Centaur people in 2021, but didn't buy any Centaur IP.
Centaur will be missed. Nothing like seeing "CentaurHauls" for a CPU ID.
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What about the Cyrix people?
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As far as I know, it got merged with AMD.
Worked well for Russia? (Score:2)
Re:Worked well for Russia? (Score:4, Interesting)
China is well past 90 nm. Huawei has a 7 nm mobile processor (Kirin 9000S.) Alibaba has a server class RV64 (RISC-V) CPU coming out this year.
Looks to me like the Chinese have decided they've achieved sufficient capability to start cutting over to domestic supply.
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and China exports to Russia including from Hong Kong.
Russia will certainly be fine for anything most weapons, cars and microwave ovens use.
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>> the Chinese have decided they've achieved sufficient capability
It is very likely that the Chinese built those chips with Western fab gear and design software that is several generations behind. They may be able to scale up even more numbers of obsolete components to satisfy captive domestic demand.
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Why would cruise missiles, microwave ovens and automobiles need anything more advanced than 90 nm?
answer, they don't. Your car might have it, because it doesn't matter.
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>> need anything more advanced than 90 nm?
My 1.5nm defenses against your clunky 90nm missiles do matter, and superior offense sure does as well. China may do well with obsolete parts in dirt cheap commodity items but who cares?
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the patriot missile used 4 i960s probably still does
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>> The patriot missile used 4 i960s
Missiles are routinely shot down these days. Drones too. The arms race continues. My networked stealth fighter drones running a suite of 1.5nm components can beat your clunky cruise missile using repurposed automotive processors. My advanced sensor suite can see where it was launched and hit that too.
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you're talking out of your ass.
Real military spec gear isn't using that fragile small node stuff
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>> Real military spec gear isn't using that fragile small node stuff
Nasty remark all you got, boy?
"new technologies and low-cost weapons are reshaping the modern battlefield."
https://theaviationist.com/202... [theaviationist.com]
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you imagine anything in that article is using things near 1 nm node? You're hilarious, and ignorant.
Guess again, those $5K drones costing a missile worth millions to shoot down are using old milspec big node stuff.
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>> You're hilarious, and ignorant.
All you ever have here is a nasty yap.
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Probably not anymore, they discontinued that processor in 2007. They probably replaced it with something cheaper.
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guess again, military variant still made, 80960XA
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China and Hong Kong are significant sources of import down to 14nm, and Russia itself is ramping up to have its fabs in the 28nm to 14nm over next few year
90nm is fine for most weapons, cars and appliances by the way. Your own car might have 90nm and doutful anything smaller than 40nm for control systems.
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Automotive was already at 35nm a few years ago, so getting something as large as 90nm is probably actually difficult.
Incidentally, you probably prefer larger process nodes for critical systems anyway - the smaller nodes are way more susceptible to SEUs, "strange" hardware effects, crosstalk, and side-channel issues because the useful electric fields are now quite difficult to confine to a single transistor.
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They will catch up, and quite likely even excel. These are very smart, able people, led by a regime that is clear about what it wants. They will get there. This is just technology of a known sort which has to be first equalled and then surpassed. A country that could go from Mao's famine and the idiocy of the cultural revolution to space launches in a matter of decades? That could go from being almost totally rural with no or minimal manufacturing to being able to build stealth supersonic aircraft and
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China's 'catch-up' has been powered more by theft than discovery. I'm kind of ambivalent about that, they've more than paid for what's been stolen with the environmental damage that came with making all out cheap crap for us.
The tighter the CCP locks the country down, the less room there is for brilliant people to excel, and the less semi-rationally assigned funding for things they might excel in. I don't see China leaping ahead any time soon. Keeping in step, sure.
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I wouldn't put "backlevel" process nodes at a disadvantage. Yes, having 1-3 nanometer process nodes is useful, and comes in handy for CPUs... but there are a lot of chips that are just fine being fabbed at 20nm before you have to go smaller and start doing voodoo with the lithography process. The larger process also has greater yields, thus cheaper to do.
Stuff for cars isn't that complex, CPU-wise. The "chips" that skyrockets car prices (more, IMHO, price-gouging to me), were nothing that couldn't be cra
Understandable (Score:3)
Ignorance is useful (Score:1)
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it makes perfect sense because it is not at all the same. those embargoes were a threat and actually boosted their own production, so they are now better suited to actually become independent, specially in public and critical infrastructure. that would be a smart thing to do for any country, but much more so for china going forward, precisely because of those embargoes. and afaik they aren't really banning anything but tbh the article is really vague beyond the screaming headline so, who knows, this might b
Damn (Score:2)
Damn it! I have a few trays of new old stock Pentium 233MMX Socket 7 chips I was going to unload on China for their planned upgrades. Oh well, they're still popular in the retro-gaming market I suppose.
GOOD! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an idiotic move because they are effectively putting a HUGE target on the processor(s) and motherboards they use and there is zero incentive for non-CCP white hat hackers to investigate hardware bugs. Moving to a Chinese government specific OS is going to have the same issue.
They might as well change their processor's logo to a giant bullseye.
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I wouldn't underestimate China and a command economy. China has odors of magnitude more engineers than the West does. Since they have the ability to dictate where people go for jobs, they could throw white-hat hackers at the CPUs, and eventually just through force of numbers, find issues with the chips.
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yeah silly, it's of course much smarter to rely on foreign systems from a hostile country because it is certified by white hat hackers ...
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The smart move would be to make a cheap x86_64 server processor that is sold worldwide. Also, the irony of China calling other countries hostile is brilliant.
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well, if you reflect a bit on what world powers actually are, you will realize that they will always consider each other hostile simply because they do have the capacity to be a threat. they have to, this is just in the nature of power.
then again, if you're surprised you probably haven't checked reality much lately. us's sanctions and embargoes on china are hostile and there is no record of any equivalent prior act of hostility from china to the us. so yes, flashy news, the us is actually officially more ho
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if you're surprised you probably haven't checked reality much lately. us's sanctions and embargoes on china are hostile
they have been behaving pretty peacefully in the international area in the past three to four decades, they expand through trade
Certainly sounds like you're part of the 50 cent army because you are completely ignoring the reasons for the sanctions. But hey, when you are defending the CCP, you don't want to bring up the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the toppling of Hong Kong, desire to topple the nation of Taiwan, currency manipulation, enslaving Muslims, exporting fentanyl, or the fact that they have banned foreign companies from even operating in China.
maybe you think that since the us are the "good guys" they get a special pass,
Nope. There are no good guys but there are definitely bad guys.
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you don't want to bring up the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the toppling of Hong Kong, desire to topple the nation of Taiwan, currency manipulation, enslaving Muslims, exporting fentanyl, or the fact that they have banned foreign companies from even operating in China.
i just fail to see how any of that qualifies as international hostility.
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Hong Kong was not part of China... and then they toppled it and absorbed it. That's international.
Taiwan is not part of China and they want to do the same thing they did to Taiwan. That's international.
Currency manipulation impacts international trade. That's international.
Slavery is a human rights violation meaning it is the concern of all nations. That's international.
Exporting fentanyl without restriction causes problems to the places it's exported. That's international.
Banning foreign companies from ope
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Hong Kong was not part of China... and then they toppled it and absorbed it. That's international.
hong kong has been part of china for thousands of years until ... wait, the british took it away and kept it for a century and a half until they handed it over back to china as an administrative region.
Taiwan is not part of China and they want to do the same thing they did to Taiwan. That's international.
"want to do" is not "do". china asserts claim over taiwan and while that's ofc debatable, i don't know of any hostile move by china to take it over yet.
Currency manipulation impacts international trade. That's international.
say what? if you mean the huge pile of us dollars in china's possession, that has benefited the us dollar for decades more than anything. other than that, cur
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"This is an idiotic move"
No it is not.
Are you aware that all Intel and AMD CPUs nowadays come with a spy chip (usually based on ARM) that has complete access to your PC, memory, screen, network?
That it can even work if the PC isn't switched on and just on power standby?
Guessed so.
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You are conflating the Intel Management Engine and the AMD Platform Security Processor which are very different in their purpose. The PSP can be immediately shutdown upon firmware execution. However, IME can't be shutdown but it can be contained.
That said, they did remove the PSP from the Hygon Dhyana chip. This is desirable for security but they also made many other changes and any one of them could be a fatal mistake. It's still an idiotic move.
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The same could be said of the US using domestic CPUs and operating systems.
China has been using domestic CPUs for a while now, and nothing cataclysmic has happened. For example, some AMD parts are produced under licence, but with certain modules replaced such as all the crypto stuff. They presumably think that the crypto is backdoored, or that the risk of it being so is too great, and prefer to use their own.
It would be really interesting to know if their crypto is backdoored by their own security services.
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Not trying to be rude but I disagree with most of your points.
The same could be said of the US using domestic CPUs and operating systems.
There is a significant difference: EVERYBODY uses these CPU/OSes (allies and enemies included) so you have a lot more security experts looking at them. The CCP would need to mandate domestic chips for all of China if you wanted a similar effect.
China has been using domestic CPUs for a while now, and nothing cataclysmic has happened.
You don't know that. Intel agencies are not advertising their discoveries or exploits. The more valuable the exploit, the less it's used, so they may have already used it or they may just be sitting on it
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They might as well change their processor's logo to a giant bullseye.
Well, at least they make it harder for NSA and CIA to hack Chinese systems. I do not like China. Explicitly so because of their form of governance. That being said, every entity has a "right" to defend themselves.
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Well, at least they make it harder for NSA and CIA to hack Chinese systems.
No, just the opposite. They are providing every western intelligence agency with a fixed target with zero chance of collateral damage by withholding information about flaws. You may not know this but the NSA reports low-hanging fruit because they want the software to be more secure but they keep all the really good hacks secret. Without any collateral damage from withholding information about stupid flaws, they are going to amass a gigantic horde of exploits.
Clickbait (Score:3)
opens up their hacking activities... (Score:1)
easier to just hit everything when none of your stuff would be affected if it's running on something different
We got more CPU supply? (Score:2)
So, does that mean that we have more CPU supplies for the rest of the world, and prices will drop(am aware the chinese government is probably a small puddle in a sea when it comes to desktop / laptop / server use considered to everyone else)?
One can dream ..........