News China bans Intel and AMD CPUs for government offices and servers, plans to switch to domestic-made alternatives

nookoool

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Fortunately for China you don't need "competitive chips" for office and most server work. Especially if you homebrew a more efficient OS than MS Windows.

I have to agree. I am still using a i7-6xxx at 14nm running linux with 32 gig of ram. This year of Chinese desktop cpu exceed that in performance. Not exactly competitive in pricing for consumer market, but should be fine for general office and government environments.

If they are having yield issues at 7nm, no reason they can't stay at 12-14nm...
 

usertests

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I have to agree. I am still using a i7-6xxx at 14nm running linux with 32 gig of ram. This year of Chinese desktop cpu exceed that in performance. Not exactly competitive in pricing for consumer market, but should be fine for general office and government environments.

If they are having yield issues at 7nm, no reason they can't stay at 12-14nm...
Something around the equivalent of a Sandy Bridge quad-core with an iGPU and modern video decode/encode is probably sufficient for most home and office use cases. And they are definitely exceeding that by this point:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...t-keeps-3a6000-well-behind-modern-competition

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...-37ghz-clocks-pcie-40-and-ddr5-memory-support

The clock speeds will be lower, but they can be compared to the latest 35W Intel/AMD chips (likely with worse efficiency though).
 

Steve Nord_

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Smart move.

You can't rely on western tech not spying on you, selling your data to 3rd parties, or failing that just leaving the barn door wide open for data to escape.

At least with your own stuff you are helping your own industry instead of competitors'.
Salty, but acceptable. We have 220 core ARM at home. [Sells used Xeon phi.]
 
Nov 2, 2023
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I have to agree. I am still using a i7-6xxx at 14nm running linux with 32 gig of ram. This year of Chinese desktop cpu exceed that in performance. Not exactly competitive in pricing for consumer market, but should be fine for general office and government environments.

If they are having yield issues at 7nm, no reason they can't stay at 12-14nm...
22 nm i7-3xxxM for me and most everything works fine too.

The only thing I can't get to run right is some machine learning stuff because I don't know how to use the dgl.use_libxsmm(False) API call in a Python ML program I downloaded from github. Libxsmm requires AVX2 and needs to be disabled in DGL when DGL is called or it errors out.
 
I love how they managed to slip a "stolen technology" dig in the article - LoongArch is specific to the LoongSong company, and Phytium is quite there with Arm-based (UK licensed) designs while still pushing RISC-V (open source). So, what "stolen technology"? More stuff stolen than Microsoft's and Apple razzia on Xerox' IP ? Or on Intel and AMD heavily inspiring themselves from the now defunct Alpha processors ?
And while both companies are far from threatening x86's share on the global Chinese market, the fact that all government offices will switch to it (because they have completed the switch to Linux-based OS) will mean that many private companies contracted by the government will also convert at least in part...
In a country like China, it means that it will soon be a force to be reckoned with. And, like said in the article, that's a quarter of the world's market in semiconductor that's threatening the x86-64 monopoly. Worrying for Intel, less so for AMD.
 
Nov 2, 2023
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I love how they managed to slip a "stolen technology" dig in the article - LoongArch is specific to the LoongSong company, and Phytium is quite there with Arm-based (UK licensed) designs while still pushing RISC-V (open source). So, what "stolen technology"?
That "dig" is literally a link to an article referencing both accusations, and proven theft. Though that linked article also states that the more recent "thefts" are more likely just poaching of employees, and not theft per se.
More stuff stolen than Microsoft's and Apple razzia on Xerox' IP ?
Apple licensed the design from Xerox. Microsoft copied UI design. Nothing stolen here, just a couple of employees head hunted.
Or on Intel and AMD heavily inspiring themselves from the now defunct Alpha processors ?
Can you expand on this point? From what I'm reading DEC was bought out and sold piecemeal to AMD and Intel. That's literally the opposite of theft.
And, like said in the article, that's a quarter of the world's market in semiconductor that's threatening the x86-64 monopoly.
One of these Chinese companies is x86-64. We'll see. It's not as if Intel can't pivot to another architecture if it absolutely has to. China's a bit over 1/6th of the world population, is fairly wealthy on an per capita basis (though there are plenty of Chinese who cannot afford a computer more expensive than a cheap smart phone, if that.), but I doubt India is going to be happy importing many Chinese processors. So yeah hopefully we can look forward to a multi-polar chip industry again, like we used to have in the 80s/90s.
 
That "dig" is literally a link to an article referencing both accusations, and proven theft. Though that linked article also states that the more recent "thefts" are more likely just poaching of employees, and not theft per se.
Yeah - "proven theft" in the early 2000, and obviously nobody cared because these tech nodes were then heavily ordered by western companies. After that, I quote the article :
"Therefore, instead of stealing advanced fabrication technologies, SMIC hires specialists from TSMC and Samsung Foundry to develop them in-house these days."
So, no theft on the article's point of focus. I stand my ground : "dig".
Apple licensed the design from Xerox. Microsoft copied UI design. Nothing stolen here, just a couple of employees head hunted.
Xerox and Apple : https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpre...-steals-from-xerox-to-battle-big-brother-ibm/, and I quote Steve Jobs Himself here : "Picasso had a saying–‘good artists copy, great artists steal’–and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
Can you expand on this point? From what I'm reading DEC was bought out and sold piecemeal to AMD and Intel. That's literally the opposite of theft.
Not exactly - Alpha was killed off by DEC failing against HP+Intel's Itanium (such a successful association) and its engineers fled to AMD, where they worked on improving the K7 then designed the K8/Opteron. Intel then grudgingly followed suite with their EM64T and tried to "outlicense" AMD out of existence, but AMD had managed to establish the x86-64 "AMD64" instruction set and while Intel had AMD by the thoat, AMD had Intel's balls in a vice grip. AMD won, actually.
One of these Chinese companies is x86-64. We'll see. It's not as if Intel can't pivot to another architecture if it absolutely has to.
You're confusing it with Zhaoxin - they have a x86-64 license since they essentially bought Via, that inherited Cyrix' license for both x86 and x86-64. They are not mentioned in the article. And Intel is bad at pivoting : they ignored ARM for all it was worth, completely failed at Itanium, their GPU business is not getting off the ground... They might prevail, but things don't look good.
China's a bit over 1/6th of the world population, is fairly wealthy on an per capita basis (though there are plenty of Chinese who cannot afford a computer more expensive than a cheap smart phone, if that.), but I doubt India is going to be happy importing many Chinese processors. So yeah hopefully we can look forward to a multi-polar chip industry again, like we used to have in the 80s/90s.
India is already importing a sh*tload of Chinese smartphones : second largest market for Xiaomi. These two countries may really dislike each other, but they don't yet mix business and politics.
 

Steve Nord_

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DEC fell hard off the top 100 listed firms after a few rounds of Intel, Broadcom, and ah, Tensilica product introduction. Being bought after effective delisting isn't the opposite of theft, it's kind of another thing; but there's no support for the claim above, DEC wasn't 99%ing tech research/funding/patents/ACM/IEEE/anything. Looking forward to the linkbait trend of 'Use this one delisted stock to {verb}! [Picture making it look hard put, maybe set in a sty.]'