Interesting Move. If you base your assumptions on Peter Zeihan and his Book the Absent Superpower, this would basically be China trying to get as much manufacturing out of the US as possible to force it to be a customer of Chinese goods indefinitely and secure access to the US consumers. In this case it obviously has also strategic value, as China can also securely supply his military with "clean" chips.
I can only recommend watching one of his talks on YT for a different pov regarding world politics: https://youtu.be/feU7HT0x_qU
>If you base your assumptions on Peter Zeihan and his Book the Absent Superpower, this would basically be China trying to get as much manufacturing out of the US as possible to force it to be a customer of Chinese goods indefinitely and secure access to the US consumers.
Why wouldn't they want to do that? Isn't that what any self-respecting country, much less a superpower, would want to work towards to?
Okay, I watched the vid. The guy is an über-pessimist. Also, he seems very confident that the position the US has is unassailable, I think he's showing a bias to the place where he's from.
I personally see Russia, China, India, and the EU forcing the US to disengage militarily around the world and I see the US-led unipolar world transforming into a multipolar world with more just global governance.
Is this an optimistic view? Maybe. But there is a chance that because nations have got used to trading rather than warring that nations might actively protect trade routes rather than go to war over resources. If Steven Pinker's last two books are to be believed large-scale great power hot conflicts are a thing of the past.
What I think Trump and Brexit show is that Europe got complacent about the military umbrella the US provides so I think the EU along with India and China and Russia are going to have to start policing the highways and seaways of world trade. That's a scenario pessimist Zeihan fails to imagine – that peace rumbles on and China and India rise to provide counterweights to the US, Russia, and the EU. Where the UK fits into all of this is anybody's guess – they may support the EU from a distance but they may fall even more into the sphere of US power.
Anyway, on the strength of the vid, whatever Zeihan is selling I'm not buying. I think the world is far more complex than great plains, river basins, and demographics.
Man, he cooks his digits and "facts" haard. What is his point? He pulls out his "revelations" just to advance himself as think tank academician/strategy consultant
This is really good for the consumers, since the Chinese are free to innovate instead of waiting for Intel.
Lately they have been coming out with really good things. The Matebook X Pro is amazing and can easily compete with Dells latest offerings, and Deepin Linux 15.6 has its own very modern user interface that makes it very enjoyable to use. Finally a linux distribution with a good sense of western style and performance, and it comes from China of all places.
Its important to be careful of spyware however, but that goes for American software as well. There is plenty of evidence that NSA is spying on everybody, and probably has access to most Americans emails and web habits already.
Caveat, I'm a European (well a Brit, so almost European) and I'm appalled by US and yes British violations of privacy and surveillance overreach. Things like the threats to cripple or ban private use of strong encryption are appallingly damaging and misguided.
However nations with an elected government accountable to the people doing this stuff is one thing. We still have the right and mechanisms to protest and these protests have frequently made a real difference. strong encryption of private communications is till legal and threats to it have gone nowhere. The fact that governments from multiple political groups, in multiple countries have looked at this and decided that the benefits to their electorate outweigh the dangers offers at least some comfort. It's at least possible that they are right, although I would prefer much stronger checks and balances.
Pervasive active harvesting, analysis, intervention, censorship and subsequent punishments of 'private' communication by a totalitarian state, with the open goal of enforcing ideological obedience is not the same thing, and it's not ok. At all.
Spyware: therein lies the rub. As a civilian I suppose I'm not a target. But if I ever expected to handle classified, sensitive or even just politically compromising material with my device I would never go for a Chinese brand. Sure, the NSA gets its grubby fingers in where it wants.. But China's surveillance engine has the heft, sophistication and motivation to collect all the data it can. Every piece of silicone could be compromised.
It's also much more likely to come back and bite you in the form of stolen IP, a visa ban, or online harassment and censorship than US and European surveillance operations.
Exactly. It's surprising that there's a big hue and cry over Chinese spyware (the Lenovo episode) while the US's NSA has been proven to possess know-how to even spy on leaders of other powerful developed nations, and destabilize a nation's nuclear program with just malware.
Also, It is not true that China never had own from scratch designed "cores." It had not one, but like 4 different families, with one being their own custom ISA (iCube.)
I as a person who meets people from Qinghua university group on 1 in every 3 industry events, I can tell. The one and only reason the huge lump of money was dished on yet another "national" chip is because the "national OS" is still is the pirated Win XP from around 2005. And according to opinion of augustly officials, no performance metrics command merit if the chip can't run it.
There is one individual from Unigroup who is the sole person responsible for bringing "the national chip" to the
MofCom on a golden platter. At around 2010, MofCom announced near one hundred grants available for the chip maker who can make that chip. NuFront was one of contenders (The company's sole purpose originally was to contend for that huge grant.) Their meeting with that guy was very short. They went to him to deliver presentation about the product. Midway, he interrupted them and asked this question: "can it run Windows?," and the next words in their conversation were "no" and "bye"
> the "national OS" is still is the pirated Win XP from around 2005
I wonder why China doesn't adopt a national policy of moving to an OS it can control, such as Linux? (Possibly in conjunction with Wine for backward compatibility, or if they want something more Windows-like, maybe ReactOS.)
Whatever limitations an open source OS stack may have, surely with enough funding those limitations could be overcome, and surely the Chinese government can afford to fund that.
> But here's where things get tricky. AMD holds a 51 percent stake in HMC, while Tianjin Haiguang Holdings owns 49%. Meanwhile, AMD owns 30% of Hygon and Tianjin Haiguang Holdings owns 70 percent.
> HMC owns the x86 IP and ends up producing the chips, which satisfies the AMD and Intel x86 cross-licensing agreements because the IP remains with a company owned primarily by AMD. But AMD provides the IP with the understanding that the company will use it to design its "own products specifically tailored to the needs of the Chinese server market." That requires quite a bit of maneuvering given the restrictions of AMD's x86 cross-licensing agreement with Intel.
> To stay within the legal boundaries, HMC licenses the IP to Hygon, which designs the x86 chips and then sells the design back to HMC.
> HMC then employs a foundry to fab the end product (likely China Foundries or TSMC). Confusingly, HMC then transfers the chips back to Hygon (the same company that designed them), which then sells the Dhyana processors.
I feel this is important, one of the things China has felt they have been held back on is chip production, especially something like the x86 and x64 chips. Now they are good to go on something that is a national priority. They can produce hundreds of thousands of cpu's as many as they want now with no limitations from the US Government since now they can do it locally.
>one of the things China has felt they have been held back on is chip production
Not sure what you mean by held back, As far as we cant tell, ignoring all the JV and shares, this is basically AMD making their EPYC chip in TSMC specially for Chinese Market.
Seems pretty incredible AMD sold the keys to the kingdom for 1/4th the x86 market for 300millionish.
I'm sure the shenanegans where they get pushed out of china are going to occur after a few years, just like they happened to tons of tech companies before them after they got raided for IP with joint partnerships...
They never had much penetration into China to begin with, maybe they consider it worth it to cut down Intel's influence.
Seems super dangerous if china starts exporting the chips however.
Presumably because, since they control the whole stack, targeting a different architecture is not a significant hurdle, and therefore they can skip having to license the x86 ISA.
Xbox One and PS4 use relatively ambitious chips, integrating an AMD multicore x86-64 CPU, with and AMD GPU.
This project seems a good deal more humble: as far as I can tell from the article, they're making single-core 32-bit x86 CPUs, and they aren't touching AMD's GPU solutions.
I imagine it's far easier to get AMD to agree to sign off the licensing agreement given that it doesn't really compete with them. Also it looks far easier to pull off, so there's less reason to have AMD themselves put the work in.
I have a sense that what happened to Detroit is about to happen to Silicon Valley. Detroit once had some of the highest median salaries (and home values) in the nation. Then Japan came and decimated what had become a fat and lazy domestic auto industry. China could easily do this to American chip makers, removing a key cornerstone of Silicon Valley's tech leadership.
Meanwhile a lot of newer innovators in areas like software and custom hardware have already gone elsewhere. People are rationally concluding that the benefits of Silicon Valley are outweighed by its insane cost of living and that those same benefits can be obtained in other ways, so they're doing their work elsewhere. I personally know of several startups that maintain fake Silicon Valley mailing addresses while being located in places like Southern California, Denver, Indianapolis, or Nashville. They keep the address for its silly prestige value since if it says "Palo Alto" on your contact page people who aren't knowledgeable think it means you're cutting edge.
Another big benefit of the Bay Area -- namely one of the most interesting cultural environments in the world -- has also been largely priced out and decimated by the local real estate bubble. That eliminates yet another draw. People might pay a lot to live in a fascinating city full of cutting edge culture and interesting people but not to live in a glorified office park.
I see a future SV tech scene that's largely hollowed out and dominated by social media, an industry toward which the public is becoming increasingly hostile as they realize it's all about surveillance and mass manipulation. Chips go to China and newer startups go to cities with saner costs of living.
As far as I know, China does not possess the newest semiconductor machines. Either it will create these chips via TSMC, or they will use a lower resolution and less powerful chips. I wonder if they can make something competitive.
This is going to be interesting.
Such a partnership will avoid another ZTE-like scenario so this is a win for China.
However this is probably going to place AMD in the crosshairs of the US administration.
Let's see how this turns out for AMD.
I really don't get why the West is gifting all this technology to a competitor. By now it should be clear that in all cases of these joint ventures the only goal is to eventually clone the product. They have ripoffs of high-speed trains, military equipment and so on. I guess this is also how Japan caught up after WWII, but there the US has still ~60000 soldiers on the ground and significant long term ties.
Summary: AMD has found a legal loophole to sell out critical x86 chip design IP to the Chinese for a cash infusion of 300+ million. Expect to see knock off copies emerge and AMD ultimately get pushed out of China in favor a local company that has their IP in hand. Their executives are either stupidly naive and in for a major shock, or plain greedy/desperate and willing to sell out the West for 300 million cash. If so then its IP laundering in my opinion. I hope the US gov regulators roast them for this. I plan to avoid their products as much as possible now.
[+] [-] Roritharr|7 years ago|reply
I can only recommend watching one of his talks on YT for a different pov regarding world politics: https://youtu.be/feU7HT0x_qU
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Why wouldn't they want to do that? Isn't that what any self-respecting country, much less a superpower, would want to work towards to?
[+] [-] igravious|7 years ago|reply
I personally see Russia, China, India, and the EU forcing the US to disengage militarily around the world and I see the US-led unipolar world transforming into a multipolar world with more just global governance.
Is this an optimistic view? Maybe. But there is a chance that because nations have got used to trading rather than warring that nations might actively protect trade routes rather than go to war over resources. If Steven Pinker's last two books are to be believed large-scale great power hot conflicts are a thing of the past.
What I think Trump and Brexit show is that Europe got complacent about the military umbrella the US provides so I think the EU along with India and China and Russia are going to have to start policing the highways and seaways of world trade. That's a scenario pessimist Zeihan fails to imagine – that peace rumbles on and China and India rise to provide counterweights to the US, Russia, and the EU. Where the UK fits into all of this is anybody's guess – they may support the EU from a distance but they may fall even more into the sphere of US power.
Anyway, on the strength of the vid, whatever Zeihan is selling I'm not buying. I think the world is far more complex than great plains, river basins, and demographics.
[+] [-] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
Man, he cooks his digits and "facts" haard. What is his point? He pulls out his "revelations" just to advance himself as think tank academician/strategy consultant
[+] [-] ssdd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] curiousgal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] some_account|7 years ago|reply
Lately they have been coming out with really good things. The Matebook X Pro is amazing and can easily compete with Dells latest offerings, and Deepin Linux 15.6 has its own very modern user interface that makes it very enjoyable to use. Finally a linux distribution with a good sense of western style and performance, and it comes from China of all places.
Its important to be careful of spyware however, but that goes for American software as well. There is plenty of evidence that NSA is spying on everybody, and probably has access to most Americans emails and web habits already.
[+] [-] simonh|7 years ago|reply
Caveat, I'm a European (well a Brit, so almost European) and I'm appalled by US and yes British violations of privacy and surveillance overreach. Things like the threats to cripple or ban private use of strong encryption are appallingly damaging and misguided.
However nations with an elected government accountable to the people doing this stuff is one thing. We still have the right and mechanisms to protest and these protests have frequently made a real difference. strong encryption of private communications is till legal and threats to it have gone nowhere. The fact that governments from multiple political groups, in multiple countries have looked at this and decided that the benefits to their electorate outweigh the dangers offers at least some comfort. It's at least possible that they are right, although I would prefer much stronger checks and balances.
Pervasive active harvesting, analysis, intervention, censorship and subsequent punishments of 'private' communication by a totalitarian state, with the open goal of enforcing ideological obedience is not the same thing, and it's not ok. At all.
[+] [-] Arn_Thor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IntelAMDVia|7 years ago|reply
That's every engineer in the world.
US does not seem to steal for economic purposes at all.
Well at least not on the same scale.
[+] [-] phyller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheArcane|7 years ago|reply
Exactly. It's surprising that there's a big hue and cry over Chinese spyware (the Lenovo episode) while the US's NSA has been proven to possess know-how to even spy on leaders of other powerful developed nations, and destabilize a nation's nuclear program with just malware.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
I as a person who meets people from Qinghua university group on 1 in every 3 industry events, I can tell. The one and only reason the huge lump of money was dished on yet another "national" chip is because the "national OS" is still is the pirated Win XP from around 2005. And according to opinion of augustly officials, no performance metrics command merit if the chip can't run it.
There is one individual from Unigroup who is the sole person responsible for bringing "the national chip" to the MofCom on a golden platter. At around 2010, MofCom announced near one hundred grants available for the chip maker who can make that chip. NuFront was one of contenders (The company's sole purpose originally was to contend for that huge grant.) Their meeting with that guy was very short. They went to him to deliver presentation about the product. Midway, he interrupted them and asked this question: "can it run Windows?," and the next words in their conversation were "no" and "bye"
[+] [-] skissane|7 years ago|reply
I wonder why China doesn't adopt a national policy of moving to an OS it can control, such as Linux? (Possibly in conjunction with Wine for backward compatibility, or if they want something more Windows-like, maybe ReactOS.)
Whatever limitations an open source OS stack may have, surely with enough funding those limitations could be overcome, and surely the Chinese government can afford to fund that.
[+] [-] bitwize|7 years ago|reply
> HMC owns the x86 IP and ends up producing the chips, which satisfies the AMD and Intel x86 cross-licensing agreements because the IP remains with a company owned primarily by AMD. But AMD provides the IP with the understanding that the company will use it to design its "own products specifically tailored to the needs of the Chinese server market." That requires quite a bit of maneuvering given the restrictions of AMD's x86 cross-licensing agreement with Intel.
> To stay within the legal boundaries, HMC licenses the IP to Hygon, which designs the x86 chips and then sells the design back to HMC.
> HMC then employs a foundry to fab the end product (likely China Foundries or TSMC). Confusingly, HMC then transfers the chips back to Hygon (the same company that designed them), which then sells the Dhyana processors.
Let's call this what it is -- IP laundering.
[+] [-] gscott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
Not sure what you mean by held back, As far as we cant tell, ignoring all the JV and shares, this is basically AMD making their EPYC chip in TSMC specially for Chinese Market.
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
Really? They have a decent MIPS story there, have had for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawning_Information_Industry#D...
They could literally have ignored x86, but they are making the same strategic blunder the UK made in the 1980s
[+] [-] pabloski|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asaka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christianbryant|7 years ago|reply
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1806.1/00730.html
[+] [-] throwaway2048|7 years ago|reply
I'm sure the shenanegans where they get pushed out of china are going to occur after a few years, just like they happened to tons of tech companies before them after they got raided for IP with joint partnerships...
They never had much penetration into China to begin with, maybe they consider it worth it to cut down Intel's influence.
Seems super dangerous if china starts exporting the chips however.
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
Why hasn't Apple, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PS 4 use this route for their semi custom SoC?
[+] [-] fake-name|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2048|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|7 years ago|reply
This project seems a good deal more humble: as far as I can tell from the article, they're making single-core 32-bit x86 CPUs, and they aren't touching AMD's GPU solutions.
I imagine it's far easier to get AMD to agree to sign off the licensing agreement given that it doesn't really compete with them. Also it looks far easier to pull off, so there's less reason to have AMD themselves put the work in.
[+] [-] api|7 years ago|reply
Meanwhile a lot of newer innovators in areas like software and custom hardware have already gone elsewhere. People are rationally concluding that the benefits of Silicon Valley are outweighed by its insane cost of living and that those same benefits can be obtained in other ways, so they're doing their work elsewhere. I personally know of several startups that maintain fake Silicon Valley mailing addresses while being located in places like Southern California, Denver, Indianapolis, or Nashville. They keep the address for its silly prestige value since if it says "Palo Alto" on your contact page people who aren't knowledgeable think it means you're cutting edge.
Another big benefit of the Bay Area -- namely one of the most interesting cultural environments in the world -- has also been largely priced out and decimated by the local real estate bubble. That eliminates yet another draw. People might pay a lot to live in a fascinating city full of cutting edge culture and interesting people but not to live in a glorified office park.
I see a future SV tech scene that's largely hollowed out and dominated by social media, an industry toward which the public is becoming increasingly hostile as they realize it's all about surveillance and mass manipulation. Chips go to China and newer startups go to cities with saner costs of living.
[+] [-] whazor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hmottestad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kypro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lgvln|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scruffyherder|7 years ago|reply
I was interested in getting one of those Chinese MIPS machines (based on the 3A2000), but they seem to have all but evaporated.
[+] [-] plumeria|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orbifold|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noetic_techy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berbec|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|7 years ago|reply
Or are they pin and chipset compatible with existing ryzen boards?
[+] [-] DannyB2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krob|7 years ago|reply