I mean, we do the same thing, for the same reasons, with our government and defense procurement orders these days. This isn’t that weird. It’s only weird in that they’re clearly cutting themselves off from the best high-volume x86 CPU manufacturers that currently exist, but aside from that, the geopolitical and strategic calculus adds up.
Gee, now it makes me think there’s an ulterior motive to conquering Taiwan…
Yes, all of the most advanced chip making factories are in Taiwan. It’s the biggest reason that the US passed the CHIPS act and also why there is so much geopolitical tension around Taiwan.
Why did you think there was so much focus on Taiwan? Boba is great and all, but surely it doesn’t merit the protection of the US Navy. 😁
TSMC is like the world’s biggest shield right now.
It’s probably the modern reason, but before semiconductors there was already a lot of nationalistic tension around Taiwan.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the person who came up with the name Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors revealed their idea. I’ve got an image of someone sitting on their hands, eyes wide and shaking slightly as their desire to share it tries to burst out of them!
Yes, all of the most advanced chip making factories are in Taiwan.
Intel is back in the game with PowerVia after the endless blunder that was 10nm.
In grander strategic terms Taiwan is, technologically, erm, dispensable. Both Europe and the US can, independently, make chips that are good enough, that are fast enough, to be used in any application the question is whether they’re cheap enough for high-end commercial use. The military doesn’t care if a chip costs twice as much and is twice as heavy the propellant and warhead of the rocket weigh magnitudes more anyway.
Where Taiwan is indispensable is being a thorn in China’s side which has strategic value all of its own.
China’s version of Cuba.
Yes, all of the most advanced chip making factories are in Taiwan.
Not really. The most advanced manufacturing sites are still in laboratories in the United States and Europe, it’s just that they are not suited for mass production.
The entire reason they haven’t tried yet is because they know they can’t do it without TSMC being scuttled.
Well the thing is Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China and they, just like the People’s Republic of China, consider themselves to be China. Officially it is a reunification (by force if necessary) of the two China’s. Its not like North and South Korea where they are officially separate countries because they both consider themselves to be one country. It’s a complicated situation from a civil war and colonization from Japan.
Tell you what’s really hilarious is listening to Chinese (mainland Chinese, any province) completely lose their shit and turn into a rabid psychopath driveling screaming moron as soon as anyone says “Taiwan number one!”.
They act like it’s the most offensive possible thing that can be said apart from Xi looking like Winnie the Pooh…because he does of course.
Nationalists are a funny bunch.
“consider themselves to be China”
“reunification (by force if necessary)”
Your own statement conflicts itself. If Taiwan considers itself part of China, why would force be necessary?
Taiwan doesn’t consider itself to be a country? Taiwan seems to disagree with that.
This post is full of dumb.
What they tried to say is, that Taiwan also considers mainland China to be their rightful territory. Taiwans official name is Republic of China, Mainland China’s official name Peoples Republic of China.
Both consider themselves to be the rightful government of the whole China (including both mainland China and Taiwan). Both do not consider the other parties rule to be legitimate.
It really is comparable to Korea or pre-unification Germany. Both governments are united in following the “one China principle”.
Ok since my “post is full of dumb” let me provide some reference material so you can enlighten yourself. Here is a Wikipedia article on the One China policy. Here is on from the Taiwan page.
EDIT: Also I never said that Taiwan considers itself part of China. I said that the Republic of China considers themselves to be China, as in, the official Chinese government. The PRC also considers itself to be official China and it considers Taiwan to be a rogue state, like how Catalonia was going rouge in Spain except the Republic of China considers itself the govt of China.
They consider themselves to be China, but don’t want to be part of the People’s Republic, I wonder why…
No, the Republic of China considers itself to be the official Chinese government and that other government, the People’s Republic of China, is a rouge state. The RC doesn’t have the military might to bring them under control and the PRC feels the same about the RC. It’s like if Texas and other southern states went rouge, declared themselves the United States of America, claimed all 50 states as part of America, and DC called BS and also claimed all 50 states. If no force is used to reconcile then only negotiations remain and that is where China is now.
Hey China I made you this sweet horse statue in the form of an x86 processor – You should put it in the town square to show it off and then all go to sleep…
x86 is dying, legacy processing. It’s all GPU’s and ARM processing now. Apple is leaning hard into it so they set themselves as a leader in AI in the future.
You very obviously don’t understand the truly enormous power of technical inertia.
Except a lot of infrastructure runs on legacy software. There’s stuff built on like windows 2000 that is still used by hospitals and governments.
There’s a lot of critical infrastructure running on Windows 3.1. A lot of very expensive machinery runs on proprietary software only released as x86 binaries, from autoclaves to MRI machines.
Oh, and here’s the fun part: Basically the only appeal Windows has is its legacy software support. ‘My games just work.’ ‘My software just runs.’ That wasn’t the case with the ARM editions of Windows, you couldn’t just run a .exe. So they either have to do emulation, which in most cases WINE under Linux works better, or lock you into their app store which is Apple but 1,000 times shittier.
You’re not wrong, but most of this legacy software runs on legacy hardware as well. Win 2k isn’t supported by most modern hardware
Which is why China is incentivizing people to switch to their ARM based OSes that run on Linux 4, I suppose
You’re getting down voted but in all honesty, you’re not wrong. All it takes is one x86/64 alternative to show the world that Intel and AMD aren’t the only players in the game. Apple did it with ARM and the m1 chip, now we’re hearing reports of Microsoft actually putting a real effort into ARM and making their own chips for AI instead of that half-assed Windows on ARM initiative. I for one love this competition, because that only benefits the consumers.
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Now I’m curious to know why.
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They’re not great, yet, but they’re pretty cheap and really small. They’ll probably get a lot better in the future though, remember the speed of x86 CPU’s was once measured in MgHZ. I remember my first P4 with one whole GgHZ of speed, before even dual core CPU’s.
This might just be for government computers, not the entire country - see https://www.ft.com/content/7bf0f79b-dea7-49fa-8253-f678d5acd64a
Still, the overall direction and intent is clear.
understandible given how the Americans are treating Huawei.
China bans Intel and AMD from government machines, the US blocked Huawei from the entirety of the US.
Unless I’m misreading the article Intel and AMD are banned for EVERYONE not just government.
That article is poorly written. This one is more informative. Since there’s a paywall, I’ll quote a few relevant parts:
"China has introduced new guidelines that will mean US microprocessors from Intel and AMD are phased out of government PCs and servers, as Beijing ramps up a campaign to replace foreign technology with homegrown solutions.
The stricter government procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options."
…
"Officials have begun following the new PC, laptop and server guidelines this year, after they were unveiled with little fanfare by the finance ministry and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on December 26. They order government agencies and party organs above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases. "
Only Chinese code is present, namely [lists three linux distros]
Linus Torvalds: *clears throat*
China Huawei’ing Linux
Well they probably know what they put in the CPUs they export to the US and Europe, so why would they?
I mean, i get it. But i wish the world would just work together on everything and stop with the country bullshit. Imagine the stuff we could make if everyone worked together.
Brothers, brothers! We should be struggling together!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=kHHitXxH-us
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Whatever that gets a RISC-V open source chip made i am supporting don’t care if its china or russia lets just hope this makes the giants follow along .
China, Russia, and open source? Hahaha
Execs from Huawei and Tencent are on the board of directors for the Linux Foundation.
That should set your alarm bells ringing.
I don’t know if it should. Linux is obviously important to the Chinese. The foundation also has employees from Intel, VMWare, Meta, Qualcomm, Microsoft, and all the Japanese electronics manufacturers on the board. If we are so afraid of China maybe we should pull all of our manufacturing back.
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Obviously there isn’t a consensus. 187 House Republicans and 33 Senate Republicans voted against the CHIPS Act for example.
Yeah i also thought about it but decided to be optimistic for a sec . Atleast i hope they indirectly press others to do so.
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I like the power conservation but I hate the “SoC”
Ampere CPUs use normal DIMMs, and don’t have integrated storage, like any other CPU. So you can have the best of both worlds (although idk about power conservation, they are efficient though).
SoCs exist primarily for power efficiency. Long external bus lines and their respective controllers are very power hungry.
Also, tightly coupled RAM reduces latency and eases cache size requirements.
This isn’t the case for everybody, but I’d wager the vast majority of people never upgrade their RAM independently of their CPU these days. There was probably a spike once 8GB became generally insufficient a few years ago, but I have a hard time imagining the same thing will happen with 16GB configs until it’s time to hop on the DDR5 train.
In a bizarre turn of events, it seems the reclusive nation of North Korea has finally succumbed to the intense chip envy brought on by China’s recent announcement of its approved CPU list. In an effort to keep pace with neighboring rivals, Kim Jong-un ordered the immediate development of a state-of-the-art microchip. And thus, ‘The Juche Chip’ was born - named after North Korea’s philosophy of self-reliance.
After months of hard work, North Korean engineers presented their masterpiece: a CPU so advanced, it can run MS-DOS smoothly on Windows ME. This revolutionary breakthrough in computing technology also boasts an impressive clock speed that’s roughly equivalent to the rate at which time moves inside a Pyongyang prison cell. With the Juche Chip, users will never have to worry about lagging, overheating or any other technical issues because their system will freeze before such problems could even arise.
Databases also make the list, and again nothing from Western devs made the cut. But Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB is mentioned, as is Tencent’s TDSQL and a handful of other made-in-China efforts.
That’s a big one.
Unless Chinese firms have been straight-up stealing trade secrets and code from the likes of Oracle and have produced such a blatant knock-off of their software that in any other country, they would have been sued out of existence, I can see a five week transition being messy-as-fuck.
Transitions to new database systems take months or even years to implement, not the 5 weeks mandated by the Chinese Communist Party. This is especially the case when you’re dealing with important stakeholder data, huge data volumes and/or statutory requirements like financial reporting.
100% someday they will use the approved CPU list to have only those with secure boot/locked bootloader enforcing only their approved operating systems too.
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What bothers me is the kernel version. Only one OS is on Linux 5 while the rest are on Linux 4‽
A debian based dystopia, I like it
Seems like a continuation of the sad state of affairs for ARM chips. Most of the allowed chips are ARM based, and most companies making ARM chips never update their kernels
This is the best summary I could come up with:
AMD and Intel are not present on a list of processors approved by China’s Information Security Evaluation Center.
The x86 architecture does make the list, but only in chips made by Shanghai Zhaoxin Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd – which is minority-owned by Taiwan’s Via Technologies and holds a license to produce x86 processors.
The other approved chip shops make processors powered by Arm cores or, in the case of Loongson Technologies, the RISC-V architecture.
Second, the Financial Times found it over the weekend and reported that publication of the list accelerated efforts in China to replace Western tech and hardware with locally developed kit.
The FT chatted to some IT shops inside China and they confirmed that they’re phasing out items like PCs running Windows, because shop-at-home mandates have taken force.
Last week, authorities again called on web platforms to police more vigilantly the use of provocative typos and puns that can be construed as criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.
The original article contains 463 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
authorities again called on web platforms to police more vigilantly the use of provocative typos and puns that can be construed as criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.
Criticism? Jail. Puns? Jail. Spelling mistake? Believe it or not, jail. We have the highest literacy in the world. Because of jail.
None of the CPUs on that list contain Intel Management Engine. What gives China, you don’t want a CPU in your CPU?
Is this really a surprise since we ban them from using our tech. I wouldn’t want my tech to hinge on an other country that doesn’t want me to have the stronger than average stuff either tbh.
