I have worked for certain major semiconductor companies. At least two of them.
The question is not “Why did AMD hand over all its IP to China,” the question is “Why did our incompetent government allow this to happen and why did they turn a blind eye to the strong arming that was going on?”
A further question is: “Why did only some (always smaller) tech companies fork over the IP while very large ones did not?”
Let me tell you a story about a fab in a distant country that begins with a C. The rumor was that it was a very expensive server fab. One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing. They locked down the factory for 48 hours and brought in a search team, scoured the building from bottom to top and then found nothing.
Then, as if by magic, the wafer appeared three feet away from where it went missing. Industrial espionage. And that is what you get when you are big.
What happens when you are small? They put a gun to your head (metaphorically) and say “Split off a company and hand it over to entities controlled by the Chinese government. All your IP will be shared with them. They will own the market in China and send you a royalty check and have the ability to modify your IP to build custom products. If you don’t like it, fuck off, no China for you.”
What lazy, incompetent and useless western journalists have been shockingly non curious about is why certain companies like Microsoft and Apple magically don’t seem to get this treatment.
It is almost as though....some other arrangement was getting made. No lazy western journalists to my knowledge have yet bothered to investigate why it is that Intel, Microsoft etc have not been forced to do these IP sharing agreements while AMD and others have.
One day, Lazy western journalists might be curious and get off their asses from
Covering trump but somehow I doubt it.
Blaming AMD for “handing over the keys” is fucking stupid. It is the United States government’s lack of a spinal cord that is the problem. These companies had no choice. Either play the game or get shut out of the market.
Bad journalism, everywhere along with a lack of curiosity.
Absolving AMD -- who actively made the choices in this case to pursue a market that they certainly didn't need to chase, and which would certainly end up biting them in the medium term -- while blaming "lazy western journalists", is simply incredible. How in the world it became the fault of journalists is an incredible stretch. The Trump bit makes your motivation suspect.
The bit about big versus small -- China pulls the same tact with virtually all foreign companies, even making Apple and others play the China game. Intel was expressly forbidden by congress of sell or licensing server chips in China, and AMD went in to try to eek a small profit in the void.
> One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing.
> One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing.
LOL sorry but a wafer isn't worth billions, single digits millions, maybe 10-20 million tops
The govt, rightly so, doesn't interfere with every single private deal. While the US govt is wising up to the threat China poses to the West and is blocking IP xfer, it's a balance that needs to be struck.
The US doesn't have China's system of rigid state control, and that's a good thing.
So basically you want US companies and economy to be controlled by the government to the same extent that Chinas companies are? Where the government needs to approve every deal with foreign suppliers and manufacturers?
That sounds very much how our socialist economy worked, glad you've decided to try the same approach we did from 1945-1990. Maybe THIS TIME it'll actually perform better than the very successful free markets of 20th century. ;)
Seriously - the most successful US companies are global corporations which have major presence in EMEA and APAC markets. They also have rather large control over communications and news fields. What do you think will happen in those non-US markets if those corporations start to be a vessel for American propaganda and foreign policy bullying? How long do you think it'll take before they find themselves banned and pushed out of non-US markets?
> The partnership with the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker was a game changer for China, which has long been unable to match the U.S.’s supercomputing power because of its inferior chips, one product the country has so far struggled to master.
Author forgot about Sunway TaihuLight, the top supercomputer in the TOP500 at the time the transfer happened, using a completely domestic CPU architecture.
> The AMD deal gave China access to state-of-the-art x86chips, which are made by only two companies in the world: AMD and Intel Corp.
Author forgot about Zhaoxin. The new LuJiaZui in particular is really interesting.
The author also omitted that China has no bleeding edge foundries (like TSMC & Samsung's 7nm fabs) and it is unlikely they will be able to build one any time soon.
Both Intel and Global Foundries are trapped on older nodes, and China is in a slightly worse position (with their most advanced node being 14nm).
All of AMD's new cores are built on TSMC 7nm, and with outdated nodes & 3 revision old designs, China is unlikely to be able to significantly improve on the designs they licensed from AMD.
Arguably, China doesn't have the homegrown talent to do chip design. Allwinner yeets barely altered SOC designs from ARM into existence, and Hygon's chip design talent is in large part not China based.
I wouldn't say they don't have the talent. Whether they do or not, they could get it very quickly. What is holding back Chinese foundries has more to do with legal architectures than human talent. A 7nm facility is a huge investment, takes years to develop, and is very location-specific. The few corporations capable of creating such a facility are hesitant to sink the required capital, energy and tradecraft into a facility in China. The long-term risks are too much for this very sensitive business.
> The author also omitted that China has no bleeding edge foundries (like TSMC & Samsung's 7nm fabs)
Is that supposed to make Americans feel any better? :) Seriously the Chinese government still thinks of Taiwan (and on a bad day Korea) as one of its provinces and given its location it could easily become one again.
Given the number of bad articles regarding China lately (NYT,Bloomberg,WSJ), It seems that the journalists of the land of freedom have the same level of integrity than the Chinese journalist.
Simple question: Chinese money saved AMD in 2013 when the stock was less than 2.5$ and the company almost dead. Why did the USA not pay for their own technology, rather than complaining 6 years later when this investment is now becoming fruitful?
I remember wondering if AMD was about to die back then from Intel strangling it to death. They totally did this out of desperation, and I'd imagine they were not the only Western company that were faced with choosing between impending doom or fire sale to China.
It's probably worth remembering that WSJ is a Murdoch property.
> Three weeks after getting the top job, Ms. Su, a Taiwan-born New Yorker, jetted to Beijing to meet officials at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. A Chinese vice minister urged her to partner with China “to achieve mutual benefits based on AMD’s technological strength,” according to a ministry press release at the time.
I assume the message is: ZOMG, foreigners are giving away US technology!
Which is true. These dual venture deals are very stupid to make long term. China is being very smart here, while the groupthink towards outsourcing and the stock market demanding Chinese access has created their own doom.
China made investments in AMD when they weren’t doing well. If they wanted to, they could have hired away AMD’s team instead. Maybe people miss the notion that this particular strategy had likely kept jobs in the US in the longer term. It is a similar strategy to Geely’s ownership of Volvo.
But of course you can expect the WSJ to spin it this way.
Perhaps some might have gone, but the majority in Silicon Valley would have just stayed there, going to Intel, IBM, Apple, and other ARM makers. People don’t change countries randomly (and so drastically) because they lost their jobs.
AMD was about to go bankcrupt in 2012-13. CEO Rory Read laid off a large number of non-engineering staff and sold off real estate to stabilize the financial situation and managed to stave off imminent bankruptcy. When Dr Lisa Su took over in 2014, AMD was desperate for a cash infusion to plow into R&D for the Zen architecture.
There was no U.S. investor willing to make a $300 million investment in a company that held key CPU and GPU technology and world-class engineering expertise. Apple, Google, Microsoft could have benefited from AMD's CPU/GPU tech but they would rather make multi-billion dollar offers for companies like Groupon and Snapchat or Dr Dre's Beats.
An American company was saved by this joint venture with China while Wall Street was gleefully shorting AMD.
This just smells like a rat like some others said. It's probably true that the deal while might not be essential probably did help Chinese cpu development. But it's unlikely that US govt. at the time didn't understand the implication or couldn't have stopped it if they really wanted it. And it's not like reporters are finding out about this just now.
I don't know the financial situation for AMD was at 2014 and they might have ceased to exists for all I know. But the article writes as if the money itself turned the company around. It's the R&D and design of a new chip that heralded a new era for AMD. And if I'm reading correctly the deal actually ended up being done in 2016 by which time most of the work on Zen was already done I presume.
As someone else said in another comment it is kind of shameful how investment works. Forget about China/US thing, chip development is important work and no one invested in it properly. For big cloud companies simply the pressure over intel (with a competitive AMD) should have been worth it by itself.
I'm also confused why it's even a problem if China has top class fabs. There'll be more competition, so it's better for us. Are we worried about Intel's profit margins?
> That technology is helping China in its race with the U.S. to build the first next-generation supercomputer—an essential tool for advanced civilian and military applications.
Are we entering a space-race with China for supercomputers or something? Did I miss the memo?
"Red danger" does indeed seem to be the narrative that western politicians, the US in particular, are pushing today.
There always has to be some fear-based narrative involving the boogeyman de jour - the Russians, the Chinese, Islamic extremists, cyberwar whatever. Any one will do, anything to deflect from real problems at home.
Yes you did miss the memo, but most of America did. My first awareness came about five years ago through friends who are in (or adjacent to) the HPC space.
What has surprised me most is the difference in awareness and framing between the Chinese and Americans I have spoken with (though obviously "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes").
When I speak with Chinese friends, and contemporaries in tech sectors, many view the current state of US-Chinese economic conflicts in two parts: a trade war and a related-but-separate "tech war". Speaking with Americans, among those who work in the technology sector, less than half see there being a separate "tech war", outside/beyond the context of the tariffs and related trade negotiations.
Outside of tech, no Americans I have spoken to see there being a separate tech war, and it is entirely contextualized in President Trump's current trade war framing.
As for Chinese nationals outside of tech, I have far fewer conversations. I did recently speak with a gentleman from a maritime BRI project in Africa (i.e. very removed from tech). He nonetheless seemed to hold a pride for recent Chinese technological advances as a part of his identity (or personality?) and viewed it as outside/beyond the specific incidentals of the current trade war. He was happy to be working on the BRI, but he thought that it was less important than the technology contest.
My guess is that a lot of it comes down to intentional framing and emphasis in popular news media?
This whole story of later years, maybe it will bring more attention to the lack of progress in commercial hardware design tools, their ridiculous price, and existing efforts to create modern open source alternatives, like SymbiFlow [1], Chisel3 [2]/FIRRTL[3], The Open ROAD[4] project, etc.
:') oh noes, china also has business men and women with money who want to invest in things. lets find any reason to be negative about it and try to get it back in our western hands
The strategy summarized as "introduce a foreign technology to the market, absorb it, and then innovate to make China a leader" is doubtlessly true, and I am for re-leveling the economic playing field (so-called) between the US and China as much as the next person, but this article over-sells and under-informs in a few ways.
For starters, there is a throwaway graph (in that it is not directly addressed in the article) of the Top500 over time. As Patrick Kennedy at STH has rightly complained on over recent years [0], there is a rising issue with taking the lower-to-mid ranks of Top500 to mean anything at all. A lot of the systems are actually web hosting platforms, being temporarily leveraged to run an HPC benchmark for marketing purposes. Most recently he called out two Chinese companies (Lenovo and Sugon) as among the largest offenders.
My other nitpick is more core to the article: it is not as if no one in China knew anything about x86 chip design before talking to AMD. Though I will admit I am underinformed on the NatSec legalities, to my knowledge there has a similar x86 license-and-joint-venture structure between Zhaoxin and VIA for many years.
The article goes on to say:
>Chinese versions of AMD chips already have been rolling off production lines.
Which brings up some ominous analogues to displacement of other American products by Chinese manufacturing. That may be inaccurate imagery, though, as it isn't clear which manufacturer's fabs are being used for the Dhyana chips. I am no industry insider but from what I can tell Hygon is fabless (as is Huawei's HiSilicon, for that matter) and I could not find any clear information as to who is actually manufacturing the chips [1]. Does anyone here know?
I'll keep my uninformed speculation to myself, but knowing whose fabs and whose process technology actually led to working Hygon designs being realized in silicon is an important detail to fully tell this tale.
Now I have no doubt China is working to catch up in this area as well, but it seems that the entire fabrication ecosystem (including companies like ASML, not just Taiwanese and American fabs) represent technology gaps equal to x86 chip design. It takes many actors to put on this play, and laying it all at AMD's feet, or using phrasing like "gave away the keys to the kingdom" feels like a solid overstatement.
The focus on supercomputing seems odd. x86 is not nearly as dominant in supercomputing as it is in servers. A quick look at the TOP500 shows many other architectures (top 3 aren't x86). Is there something a homegrown x86 chip would give China over top of the line Intel silicon? Does Intel have secret IP on the die that only the US govt can access?
If Chinese manufacturers infringe on patented technologies, then it will be easy to ban import of their products. If they don't infringe and make something innovative then there is no problem. Having more competition is better for consumers.
Also, as AMD entered the deal voluntarily, it means that it was considered profitable despite the risks.
And I don't see the problem with building a supercomputer. Is it a privilege that shouldn't be available to developing countries?
there is a flood of anti-china articles because china threatens the US' monopoly on high-tech profitmaking, and the US companies and rich people are laying the basis to protect their profits with war.
[+] [-] intheknow12|6 years ago|reply
The question is not “Why did AMD hand over all its IP to China,” the question is “Why did our incompetent government allow this to happen and why did they turn a blind eye to the strong arming that was going on?”
A further question is: “Why did only some (always smaller) tech companies fork over the IP while very large ones did not?”
Let me tell you a story about a fab in a distant country that begins with a C. The rumor was that it was a very expensive server fab. One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing. They locked down the factory for 48 hours and brought in a search team, scoured the building from bottom to top and then found nothing.
Then, as if by magic, the wafer appeared three feet away from where it went missing. Industrial espionage. And that is what you get when you are big.
What happens when you are small? They put a gun to your head (metaphorically) and say “Split off a company and hand it over to entities controlled by the Chinese government. All your IP will be shared with them. They will own the market in China and send you a royalty check and have the ability to modify your IP to build custom products. If you don’t like it, fuck off, no China for you.”
What lazy, incompetent and useless western journalists have been shockingly non curious about is why certain companies like Microsoft and Apple magically don’t seem to get this treatment.
It is almost as though....some other arrangement was getting made. No lazy western journalists to my knowledge have yet bothered to investigate why it is that Intel, Microsoft etc have not been forced to do these IP sharing agreements while AMD and others have.
One day, Lazy western journalists might be curious and get off their asses from Covering trump but somehow I doubt it.
Blaming AMD for “handing over the keys” is fucking stupid. It is the United States government’s lack of a spinal cord that is the problem. These companies had no choice. Either play the game or get shut out of the market.
Bad journalism, everywhere along with a lack of curiosity.
[+] [-] mappu|6 years ago|reply
Microsoft regularly shares Windows source code with foreign governments for them to inspect.
From 2003 https://www.infoworld.com/article/2681548/china-gets-access-...
[+] [-] endorphone|6 years ago|reply
The bit about big versus small -- China pulls the same tact with virtually all foreign companies, even making Apple and others play the China game. Intel was expressly forbidden by congress of sell or licensing server chips in China, and AMD went in to try to eek a small profit in the void.
[+] [-] jdsully|6 years ago|reply
I assume you mean the mask set...
[+] [-] evancox100|6 years ago|reply
LOL sorry but a wafer isn't worth billions, single digits millions, maybe 10-20 million tops
[+] [-] secfirstmd|6 years ago|reply
Your point about journalists. Maybe it's fair. Maybe they don't know what to look for or how to get/report it.
You seem to have an inside track. Why not reach out to some of them anonymously and do a public service?
I can recommend a few very good ones who would be interested if you don't know some already.
[+] [-] jorblumesea|6 years ago|reply
The US doesn't have China's system of rigid state control, and that's a good thing.
[+] [-] dbancajas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhegart|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] izacus|6 years ago|reply
That sounds very much how our socialist economy worked, glad you've decided to try the same approach we did from 1945-1990. Maybe THIS TIME it'll actually perform better than the very successful free markets of 20th century. ;)
Seriously - the most successful US companies are global corporations which have major presence in EMEA and APAC markets. They also have rather large control over communications and news fields. What do you think will happen in those non-US markets if those corporations start to be a vessel for American propaganda and foreign policy bullying? How long do you think it'll take before they find themselves banned and pushed out of non-US markets?
[+] [-] mappu|6 years ago|reply
Author forgot about Sunway TaihuLight, the top supercomputer in the TOP500 at the time the transfer happened, using a completely domestic CPU architecture.
> The AMD deal gave China access to state-of-the-art x86chips, which are made by only two companies in the world: AMD and Intel Corp.
Author forgot about Zhaoxin. The new LuJiaZui in particular is really interesting.
[+] [-] est|6 years ago|reply
It can be traced back to DEC's ALPHA chips.
[+] [-] metildaa|6 years ago|reply
Both Intel and Global Foundries are trapped on older nodes, and China is in a slightly worse position (with their most advanced node being 14nm).
All of AMD's new cores are built on TSMC 7nm, and with outdated nodes & 3 revision old designs, China is unlikely to be able to significantly improve on the designs they licensed from AMD.
Arguably, China doesn't have the homegrown talent to do chip design. Allwinner yeets barely altered SOC designs from ARM into existence, and Hygon's chip design talent is in large part not China based.
[+] [-] sandworm101|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinkfoot|6 years ago|reply
Dear lord.
1. Patterson and Hennessy revolutionised CPU design with little more than grad students
2. ARM recounts how Western Digital's design bureau was little more than a suburban house
3. Apple merrily makes its own CPUs
4. China has already made more than one CPU - mainly MIPS.
The good (or bad news) is we are all about to find out.
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply
Is that supposed to make Americans feel any better? :) Seriously the Chinese government still thinks of Taiwan (and on a bad day Korea) as one of its provinces and given its location it could easily become one again.
[+] [-] rwmj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodz4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greatpatton|6 years ago|reply
Simple question: Chinese money saved AMD in 2013 when the stock was less than 2.5$ and the company almost dead. Why did the USA not pay for their own technology, rather than complaining 6 years later when this investment is now becoming fruitful?
[+] [-] sct202|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RomanBob|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jpmattia|6 years ago|reply
> Three weeks after getting the top job, Ms. Su, a Taiwan-born New Yorker, jetted to Beijing to meet officials at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. A Chinese vice minister urged her to partner with China “to achieve mutual benefits based on AMD’s technological strength,” according to a ministry press release at the time.
I assume the message is: ZOMG, foreigners are giving away US technology!
[+] [-] azinman2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambdasquirrel|6 years ago|reply
But of course you can expect the WSJ to spin it this way.
[+] [-] azinman2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est|6 years ago|reply
Or: how China invested in AMD when its stock price was at historical low, so in return AMD gave China its x86 secrets and Zen architecture.
[+] [-] AareyBaba|6 years ago|reply
There was no U.S. investor willing to make a $300 million investment in a company that held key CPU and GPU technology and world-class engineering expertise. Apple, Google, Microsoft could have benefited from AMD's CPU/GPU tech but they would rather make multi-billion dollar offers for companies like Groupon and Snapchat or Dr Dre's Beats.
An American company was saved by this joint venture with China while Wall Street was gleefully shorting AMD.
[+] [-] tmd83|6 years ago|reply
I don't know the financial situation for AMD was at 2014 and they might have ceased to exists for all I know. But the article writes as if the money itself turned the company around. It's the R&D and design of a new chip that heralded a new era for AMD. And if I'm reading correctly the deal actually ended up being done in 2016 by which time most of the work on Zen was already done I presume.
As someone else said in another comment it is kind of shameful how investment works. Forget about China/US thing, chip development is important work and no one invested in it properly. For big cloud companies simply the pressure over intel (with a competitive AMD) should have been worth it by itself.
[+] [-] izacus|6 years ago|reply
If only this article had substantial content... but, as other commenters pointed out, it doesn't even pass the basic smell test.
[+] [-] rwmj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runciblespoon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craftinator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
Are we entering a space-race with China for supercomputers or something? Did I miss the memo?
[+] [-] GordonS|6 years ago|reply
There always has to be some fear-based narrative involving the boogeyman de jour - the Russians, the Chinese, Islamic extremists, cyberwar whatever. Any one will do, anything to deflect from real problems at home.
God I detest the politics of today :(
[+] [-] cc439|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chao-|6 years ago|reply
What has surprised me most is the difference in awareness and framing between the Chinese and Americans I have spoken with (though obviously "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes").
When I speak with Chinese friends, and contemporaries in tech sectors, many view the current state of US-Chinese economic conflicts in two parts: a trade war and a related-but-separate "tech war". Speaking with Americans, among those who work in the technology sector, less than half see there being a separate "tech war", outside/beyond the context of the tariffs and related trade negotiations.
Outside of tech, no Americans I have spoken to see there being a separate tech war, and it is entirely contextualized in President Trump's current trade war framing.
As for Chinese nationals outside of tech, I have far fewer conversations. I did recently speak with a gentleman from a maritime BRI project in Africa (i.e. very removed from tech). He nonetheless seemed to hold a pride for recent Chinese technological advances as a part of his identity (or personality?) and viewed it as outside/beyond the specific incidentals of the current trade war. He was happy to be working on the BRI, but he thought that it was less important than the technology contest.
My guess is that a lot of it comes down to intentional framing and emphasis in popular news media?
[+] [-] xvilka|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://symbiflow.githib.io
[2] https://github.com/freechipsproject/chisel3
[3] https://github.com/freechipsproject/firrtl
[4] https://theopenroadproject.org/
[+] [-] Topgamer7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vectorEQ|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chao-|6 years ago|reply
For starters, there is a throwaway graph (in that it is not directly addressed in the article) of the Top500 over time. As Patrick Kennedy at STH has rightly complained on over recent years [0], there is a rising issue with taking the lower-to-mid ranks of Top500 to mean anything at all. A lot of the systems are actually web hosting platforms, being temporarily leveraged to run an HPC benchmark for marketing purposes. Most recently he called out two Chinese companies (Lenovo and Sugon) as among the largest offenders.
My other nitpick is more core to the article: it is not as if no one in China knew anything about x86 chip design before talking to AMD. Though I will admit I am underinformed on the NatSec legalities, to my knowledge there has a similar x86 license-and-joint-venture structure between Zhaoxin and VIA for many years.
The article goes on to say:
>Chinese versions of AMD chips already have been rolling off production lines.
Which brings up some ominous analogues to displacement of other American products by Chinese manufacturing. That may be inaccurate imagery, though, as it isn't clear which manufacturer's fabs are being used for the Dhyana chips. I am no industry insider but from what I can tell Hygon is fabless (as is Huawei's HiSilicon, for that matter) and I could not find any clear information as to who is actually manufacturing the chips [1]. Does anyone here know?
I'll keep my uninformed speculation to myself, but knowing whose fabs and whose process technology actually led to working Hygon designs being realized in silicon is an important detail to fully tell this tale.
Now I have no doubt China is working to catch up in this area as well, but it seems that the entire fabrication ecosystem (including companies like ASML, not just Taiwanese and American fabs) represent technology gaps equal to x86 chip design. It takes many actors to put on this play, and laying it all at AMD's feet, or using phrasing like "gave away the keys to the kingdom" feels like a solid overstatement.
[0] https://www.servethehome.com/top500-june-2019-our-new-system...
[1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hygon
[+] [-] DevKoala|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotron|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulzeraj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwip|6 years ago|reply
A) they didn't already have nukes
B) making your own x86 processors were a prerequisite to nuclear technology
[+] [-] fuzzyset|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codedokode|6 years ago|reply
Also, as AMD entered the deal voluntarily, it means that it was considered profitable despite the risks.
And I don't see the problem with building a supercomputer. Is it a privilege that shouldn't be available to developing countries?
[+] [-] grwthckrmstr|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps it would be wise for people to keep that filter in mind (as this is how mass manipulation works folks).
[+] [-] 0x262d|6 years ago|reply