15 ms·

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply. Western companies were reluctant to give up their best tech so China ended up with last generate tech which, still, was way better than it had. This was a status quo that benefited both sides enough that it worked well enough for 20 to 30 years. Now the stakes are getting higher. China wants to level up by buying foreign tech companies with, essentially, state capital and the West naturally doesn't see that to be in their interests and so they block those purchases. The West wants to enter China with their latest internet block busters and China doesn't see that in their interests and so they block that but, more often in a soft way. They open the door, allow foreign companies to enter and train locals in the technology and then slam the door when they gain traction. Both sides are well aware of the stakes and the situation what's evolving are the techniques and strategies of the competitors. It's a big boy's game for large nation states and if you're not that big you're likely to take some bruises. If you're a fan of raw capitalism though pull up a chair and a beer and watch the game.

skynetv2 10y ago
> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, cooling system etc individually. No one and I say again, NO ONE, expected they would build a full system at such a capability in such a short time.
- batbomb 10y ago
  Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources. At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.
    - Zafira 10y ago
      The political will in the West is lacking to move fast in recent decades and really support these kinds of projects. The CCP has something to prove, though, and right now they'll displace entire communities, disappear anyone who objects and destroy historic sites if that's what it takes for certain projects to get built.
      - twblalock 10y ago
        That doesn't mean this isn't impressive. What's your point?
        oblio 10y ago
        I think his point is that there are some boundaries over which we do not go, at least not easily. Meanwhile the disregard of Chinese governments for Chinese citizens can fill volumes :)
        Daishiman 10y ago
        If you think the US government or industry haven't then it's because you've never read any history.
        oblio 10y ago
        I've read plenty and the casualties are an order of magnitude bigger on the Chinese side.
        Daishiman 10y ago
        Tens of millions versus a hundred million, what a fucking victory for humanity...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- klodolph 10y ago
  You're looking at the PR, look at the actual technology. Anyone can build a big enough supercomputer if you throw enough money at the problem. This high level of spending is getting hard to justify, however, because most of the problems you want to solve can't be solved just by throwing another order of magnitude of computing power at the problem. Building a supercomputer becomes a bit of a boondoggle, a public-relations move. But China can't build the components for those supercomputers. Nobody can build all of them, but China can't fab the processors. Search for "list of semiconductor fabs", find a table, sort by node, and then scroll down until you find a Chinese node that does something other than just churn out flash memory. You'll find SMIC with a couple 40nm or 45nm fabs. That's not just the last generation of tech, that's three generations old (14 [current] => 22 => 32 => 45). By comparison, the market is flooded with cheap 32nm Xeons being dumped from our data centers.
  - jdietrich 10y ago
    TSMC have two 16nm fabs and are building a 10nm fab.
    - umanwizard 10y ago
      TSMC fabs are mostly in Taiwan, not China.
      - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
        And Taiwan would never let those fabs go to China, they have plenty of laws against that. Only oldish fab tech can be exported to the Mainland.
    - akiselev 10y ago
      Taiwan is not China. Where in China is TSMC building cutting edge semiconductor fab?
      - jdietrich 10y ago
        The Republic of China is not recognised by the UN. It is no more a state than Transnistria or South Ossetia.
- narrator 10y ago
  The west's critical flaw is that it believes its own propaganda. The "Washington Consensus" believed that no country could develop or resist the temptations of the "superior" culture and understanding of the western financial system and industry. That the countries that they were moving into were hopeless without their intelligence and guidance and would quickly fall in line and become dependent and helpless without their western overlords. They believed that they would always have a military advantage, that they would always get to set the rules. The financial crash, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The political transformation, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The internet liberalization, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. Now the Chinese are catching up technologically and them actually getting ahead of us which, from a socio/political perspective, is akin to negative interest rates. It's a discontinuous transformation that inverts all the equations of western thinking. Let me give you a quick example to illustrate this. Recently, I was in the pacific northwest. I was talking to a developer who was pointing at a lot that was basically a clean hole in the ground. He said that a Chinese developer was going to build a 5 story building their in two weeks and the entire structure was manufactured in China with ducts, plumbing, wiring all up to American code and all the floor units just had to be unloaded, placed with a crane and snapped together. (Look up "Broad Sustainable Building Group", among several companies in China doing this, if you want to learn more about this technology). The local developers were mystified. As if you told someone in 1990 that calling people anywhere in the world would be free over the internet. I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that: stuff coming out of China that will mystify us because we didn't invent it. The first mystifying innovation was the financial system that never crashed. The rest are coming.
  - fryguy 10y ago
    Was that anything like the hotel in San Antonio? http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400 http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400
    - narrator 10y ago
      That was 202 working days to build a 21 story building. Broad built a 57 story building with 800 apartments at the speed of 3 floors per day: http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/broad-sustainable-building-completes-57-story-tower-building-3-floors-day.html http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/broad-sustainab... . So the same concept, but built 30x faster. The whole building is basically built at a factory and each segment is hauled in and snapped together.
- walrus01 10y ago
  Building the world's fastest supercomputer is a financial and construction problem, not so much engineering. Assuming we are talking about a system built out of thousands of distinct nodes. If I wanted rank #1 on the top500 list, had $900 million sitting around and wanted to build something faster, I could, by hiring some of the people responsible for building massive datacenter facilities in the US (750,000 sq ft+) with their associated cooling, generator, UPS systems, and buying several metric shitloads of 1U supermicro dual xeon systems. All of that also assumes that it's a supercomputer designed for compute tasks that can be neatly divided up into small chunks and doesn't require a totally proprietary bespoke interconnect (rather, it can use something COTS). It is a budget problem, not technical: Are you prepared to fork out the money for a hundred 200 kilowatt air conditioners all running in parallel? Do you have the real estate for them and their air handlers?
- grobaru 10y ago
  Are you kidding me ? Do you seriously have a clue what you are talking about ? Lets ignore that almost every company sources components from china and loses its know-how in a process. But did you actually know that Chinese research on CPU greatly benefitted from OPEN SPARC and OPEN POWER projects ? Both coming from the WEST ?
- Xcelerate 10y ago
  > It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer A buggy supercomputer that's down most of the time. In practice, Titan is still the world's fastest supercomputer. This isn't to say that China won't pass the US for real in supercomputing; it's just at the current moment their supercomputer is really only the best on paper. EDIT: Actually, I didn't notice that the Sunway TaihuLight became active in June. I don't much about this supercomputer, so my comment only applies to the Tianhe-2.
- zerohp 10y ago
  As someone who spends a lot of time studying computer architecture, I'm skeptical about this machine because of its interconnect design and memory bandwidth. It seems to be optimized specifically for LINPACK. Many people are critical of that benchmark and some labs refuse to participate in Top 500 because of it. From [1]: >However, as we know LINPACK does not tell the whole story. On the HPCG benchmark, Sunway TaihuLight reported only .371 petaflops, which is .3 percent of peak. Compare this with 0.580 petaflops on Tianhe-2 (1.1 percent of peak) and .322 petaflops on Titan (1.2 percent of peak). RIKEN’s K computer reports 0.460 HPCG performance, 4.1 percent theoretical peak. 1: https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunway/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunwa... EDIT: To be more blunt, this machine might have more PR value than scientific value.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  The Linpack benchmark, which is the gold standard for the top500 super computer list you're referring to, can be gamed with a shitload of GPUs. The Chinese computers you're referring to simply have an enormous amount of GPUs. These aren't generalized computers, but quite specialized one. It is quite historic on its own, but the utility isn't quite what you might expect.
  - zerohp 10y ago
    A system built with the same peak flops using GPUs would actually be more useful than what they built. The Sunway TaihuLight processing elements have 64KB scratchpad, no data cache, and have less memory bandwidth than Nvidia Fermi (7 years old.) For most applications the processing elements will be so starved for data that they are just an idle waste of energy. http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-report-2016.pdf http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect." How laughable. Is anyone in the world using a Chinese based OS? Is anyone outside of China really even using a Chinese OS derived from American ones? Is anyone in the US really using Chinese software? Can you name any big Chinese products or services that we use in the West besides cheap commodity stuff?
bradleyjg 10y ago
You left out the espionage part of the technology transfer equation.
- chillydawg 10y ago
  You don't need much espionage when western companies are literally sending specs for their products to be manufactured in China.
  - jazzyk 10y ago
    Or are forced to set up joint ventures with Chinese companies as a condition of entering the Chinese market. After a few years, once the technology transfer/know-how has been transferred, the joint venture is dissolved.
  - danielrhodes 10y ago
    I visited an Airbus factory and on the floor were dozens of pallets filled with parts ready to be loaded on a ship headed for China. The tour guide said that in order for big orders of Airbus planes to be made from China, Airbus had agreed to do final assembly in China. Boeing on the other hand, he smirked, did not agree to this and subsequently didn't get the orders (this has since changed and Boeing is doing the same, just not final assembly). It was pretty obvious to me why Boeing would not have wanted to do this, but Airbus didn't seem to have the same reservations. I will bet that in 5-10 years, China will start manufacturing its own airplanes.
    - notfromhere 10y ago
      Airbus is going to regret that decision. The old adage about capitalists selling the noose that hangs them holds true
      - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
        Meh. Building an airplane isn't that hard anyways, China will get there soon if they aren't already (e.g. with the C919). It is very difficult to build avionics and jet engines that work, which are just shipped whole sale in final assembly. It will take China much much much longer to replicate that technology, and final assembly rights aren't going to help much at all.
flexie 10y ago
A lot of the consumer tech I like the most is Chinese made: laptops, smartphones, cars, drones. Another decade of this trend and China will have all production engineering knowledge in the world and the US and Europe none. Maybe China stacks the cards in its home market, but its not like the US (and other Western countries) doesn't.
- ptero 10y ago
  China IMO has mastered efficient (low cost) scalable production of standard components. This is the ticket for mass produced consumer tech. Low wage was one of the big drives of this which might change in the near/mid term. If the age of custom built products does appear this may put another damper on China insustrial production growth. In either case, next 10-15 years should be very interesting, hopefully in a good way (disruptions that are uncomfortable, but not crippling and lead to better setup in the end).
LiweiZ 10y ago
I hold a similar view. My nation now is heavily incentivized by shallow copy with little for deep copy. I just want to know what would happen next. Perhaps the context change on the global stage would break the balance and force a player to seek risky actions and...
erdevs 10y ago
It seems to me that China outplayed the West here by a wide margin. For some reason, the West has let China get away with extremely protectionist trade policies the likes of which no one else in the world would dare even attempt. I think this was a combination of fear that isolating China vs creating a high degree of economic interdependence could lead to war down the line, and a lack of control over Western companies who sought to break into China. The situation today is deeply concerning. I think Western nations need to take dramatic action to curb / disincent China's protectionist policies and let their market open up to the rest of the world. If they won't truly do so, then the West needs to respond in kind.
- LiweiZ 10y ago
  The interests for both parties are now interlocked and the stakes are very high. So things are not that simple. Change will be gradual till a tipping point.
- tiatia 10y ago
  > It seems to me that China outplayed the West here by a wide margin. Don't worry, the game is not over yet. >For some reason, the West has let China get away with extremely protectionist trade policies the likes of which no one else in the world would dare even attempt. Yes. But this could be changed by Trump in one day. (Sorry, I know that this is an extremely liberal board). Chinese don't believe in win-win. They believe in win-lose. Thats great but in my experience there is a point where you run out of stupid people to screw over. Also, it is difficult to do business with Chinese. Why? Because a lot of their decisions are irrational and it is extremely difficult to have an opponent that does irrational decisions. But this will backfire or is backfirering already. Why? With 10 or 12% growth you can afford to make irrational decisions. But try this at 6,5 or 4 percent growth. Good luck with that.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    > Yes. But this could be changed by Trump in one day. OH really? How will he do that?
noonespecial 10y ago
I'm hoping a genuine, knock-down drag-out economic competition will get an American president back up on the podium saying stuff more like "We choose to go to the moon" instead of this useless, vague "great again" nonsense.
- n00b101 10y ago
  > saying stuff more like "We choose to go to the moon" So ... building space missile technology for a cold war arms race?
guelo 10y ago
The US government is completely dysfunctional and corrupt at this point and is unable to muster any kind of coherent trade policy. This has allowed China to outmaneuver US repeatedly. This is most obvious recently in the Boeing deal where they are going to build a factory in China and give away all there knowhow after congress refused to reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import Bank, blocked by one senator. See here http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/business/international/a-single-senator-stymies-the-export-import-bank.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/business/international/a-s...
chrischen 10y ago
You make it sound like the West consciously decided to outsource to China. This is not the case, and the West would not have had the unity to be able to consciously do such a thing. Simple market dynamics caused this, albeit caused by market manipulation on China's part. China buys US debt, lowering the value of the Chinese dollars to the US dollar, making stuff in China dirt cheap.
- legulere 10y ago
  International trade isn't a free market in the typical sense, and countries are the largest actors.
- hollerith 10y ago
  Uh, the US government's granting China most-favored-nation trading status was certainly a conscious decision, and China would not be as far along economically if the decision had gone the other way. (Driving a wedge between China and the Soviet Union was the main reason behind the decision IIUC.)
jgroch 10y ago
(edited) xxx....xxx (end-edit) ref. Yale (wash your hands aftah ya piss...lol). FacebookIsEvil $C$C$C....CCC...ccc... ... __ _ '
muddyrivers 10y ago
Uber and Google are very different cases. They, as tech companies, are also different cases from consumer companies. Detailed analysis are required to gain insights on why they succeed or failed. In short, Google posed a thread to the government and the political system. If it was allowed to run freely, it will break the restrictions and the controls the government has been trying to impose on the internet. So the government can't afford to have Google freely spread information, etc. Uber doesn't impose such a threat. In my opinion, Didi simply outperforms Uber. I use Uber and Lyft in USA. Last summer I was in China and tried Didi and Uber on purpose. I think Didi's app was easier to use, had better design, more integrated to other services, and had more drivers. I talked to the drivers. My general impression was that the drivers were more content at working with Didi. This was especially true when issues occurred. Didi were more eager to work with drivers to get issues resolved, while some drivers complained that Uber was kind of condescending, treated drivers less well. As for traditional consumer companies like Walmart, etc. cutting costs was their primary goal, IMHO. When one complains about cheap products from China, has she/he thought about supply and demand? If the demand for such cheap products is low, will the companies continue making them? For example, there are high-quality hand-made silk, linen, cotton clothes in China, I don't think the big companies are interested in them. The market for high-end stuffs is always small. Most people would prefer to buy high-end stuffs on well-established brands, like those in France, Italy, etc. It takes time to build such a brand. So it is not as profitable to cheap products. Due to the drastic disruption before 1980 in China, Chinese start to build high-end products only in last several years. It will take at least another 20 years, IMHO, for such products to mature in both quality and design, and be recognized. We have some cotton fabric hand-made by my wife's grandmother, in traditional ways. After 40 years, they are still both soft and sturdy (of course, we don't use them that often, since they are so precious for us.) It feels just so good, much better than those very good quality beddings one can find in department stores here. You won't find such products in department stores, though. That is my point.
jgroch 10y ago
"It's a big boy's game for large nation states...." The Koreans have a saying: "...like a shrimp between two whales...."
qiqing 10y ago
Relevant: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/u-s-imposes-dumping-duties-on-imports-of-chinese-solar-goods http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/u-s-impose... '“Economically counterproductive tariffs have artificially made solar panel prices in the U.S. the most expensive in the world,” Shah said. CASE was formed to represent most of the U.S. solar industry against the petition. Solarworld AG, a German company with a factory in Oregon, persuaded the Commerce Department in 2012 to apply tariffs on imports of solar cells from China.'
hourislate 10y ago
I am always amused how people disregard the largest transfer of wealth that has ever occurred. China is responsible for the theft of trillions of US tax payers dollars through their incessant hacking and stealing of technology. From the US Military to private companies, there is no limit to their State Sponsored theft. I'm not even going to include what the have stolen from Europe. We can talk about barrier to entry but the real problem lies in unabated theft.

skynetv2 10y ago

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, cooling system etc individually. No one and I say again, NO ONE, expected they would build a full system at such a capability in such a short time.

batbomb 10y ago
Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources. At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.
- twblalock 10y ago
  You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.
  - Zafira 10y ago
    The political will in the West is lacking to move fast in recent decades and really support these kinds of projects. The CCP has something to prove, though, and right now they'll displace entire communities, disappear anyone who objects and destroy historic sites if that's what it takes for certain projects to get built.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      That doesn't mean this isn't impressive. What's your point?
      - oblio 10y ago
        I think his point is that there are some boundaries over which we do not go, at least not easily. Meanwhile the disregard of Chinese governments for Chinese citizens can fill volumes :)
        Daishiman 10y ago
        If you think the US government or industry haven't then it's because you've never read any history.
        oblio 10y ago
        I've read plenty and the casualties are an order of magnitude bigger on the Chinese side.
        Daishiman 10y ago
        Tens of millions versus a hundred million, what a fucking victory for humanity...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
klodolph 10y ago
You're looking at the PR, look at the actual technology. Anyone can build a big enough supercomputer if you throw enough money at the problem. This high level of spending is getting hard to justify, however, because most of the problems you want to solve can't be solved just by throwing another order of magnitude of computing power at the problem. Building a supercomputer becomes a bit of a boondoggle, a public-relations move. But China can't build the components for those supercomputers. Nobody can build all of them, but China can't fab the processors. Search for "list of semiconductor fabs", find a table, sort by node, and then scroll down until you find a Chinese node that does something other than just churn out flash memory. You'll find SMIC with a couple 40nm or 45nm fabs. That's not just the last generation of tech, that's three generations old (14 [current] => 22 => 32 => 45). By comparison, the market is flooded with cheap 32nm Xeons being dumped from our data centers.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  TSMC have two 16nm fabs and are building a 10nm fab.
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    TSMC fabs are mostly in Taiwan, not China.
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      And Taiwan would never let those fabs go to China, they have plenty of laws against that. Only oldish fab tech can be exported to the Mainland.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    Taiwan is not China. Where in China is TSMC building cutting edge semiconductor fab?
    - jdietrich 10y ago
      The Republic of China is not recognised by the UN. It is no more a state than Transnistria or South Ossetia.
narrator 10y ago
The west's critical flaw is that it believes its own propaganda. The "Washington Consensus" believed that no country could develop or resist the temptations of the "superior" culture and understanding of the western financial system and industry. That the countries that they were moving into were hopeless without their intelligence and guidance and would quickly fall in line and become dependent and helpless without their western overlords. They believed that they would always have a military advantage, that they would always get to set the rules. The financial crash, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The political transformation, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The internet liberalization, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. Now the Chinese are catching up technologically and them actually getting ahead of us which, from a socio/political perspective, is akin to negative interest rates. It's a discontinuous transformation that inverts all the equations of western thinking. Let me give you a quick example to illustrate this. Recently, I was in the pacific northwest. I was talking to a developer who was pointing at a lot that was basically a clean hole in the ground. He said that a Chinese developer was going to build a 5 story building their in two weeks and the entire structure was manufactured in China with ducts, plumbing, wiring all up to American code and all the floor units just had to be unloaded, placed with a crane and snapped together. (Look up "Broad Sustainable Building Group", among several companies in China doing this, if you want to learn more about this technology). The local developers were mystified. As if you told someone in 1990 that calling people anywhere in the world would be free over the internet. I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that: stuff coming out of China that will mystify us because we didn't invent it. The first mystifying innovation was the financial system that never crashed. The rest are coming.
- fryguy 10y ago
  Was that anything like the hotel in San Antonio? http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400 http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400
  - narrator 10y ago
    That was 202 working days to build a 21 story building. Broad built a 57 story building with 800 apartments at the speed of 3 floors per day: http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/broad-sustainable-building-completes-57-story-tower-building-3-floors-day.html http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/broad-sustainab... . So the same concept, but built 30x faster. The whole building is basically built at a factory and each segment is hauled in and snapped together.
walrus01 10y ago
Building the world's fastest supercomputer is a financial and construction problem, not so much engineering. Assuming we are talking about a system built out of thousands of distinct nodes. If I wanted rank #1 on the top500 list, had $900 million sitting around and wanted to build something faster, I could, by hiring some of the people responsible for building massive datacenter facilities in the US (750,000 sq ft+) with their associated cooling, generator, UPS systems, and buying several metric shitloads of 1U supermicro dual xeon systems. All of that also assumes that it's a supercomputer designed for compute tasks that can be neatly divided up into small chunks and doesn't require a totally proprietary bespoke interconnect (rather, it can use something COTS). It is a budget problem, not technical: Are you prepared to fork out the money for a hundred 200 kilowatt air conditioners all running in parallel? Do you have the real estate for them and their air handlers?
grobaru 10y ago
Are you kidding me ? Do you seriously have a clue what you are talking about ? Lets ignore that almost every company sources components from china and loses its know-how in a process. But did you actually know that Chinese research on CPU greatly benefitted from OPEN SPARC and OPEN POWER projects ? Both coming from the WEST ?
Xcelerate 10y ago
> It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer A buggy supercomputer that's down most of the time. In practice, Titan is still the world's fastest supercomputer. This isn't to say that China won't pass the US for real in supercomputing; it's just at the current moment their supercomputer is really only the best on paper. EDIT: Actually, I didn't notice that the Sunway TaihuLight became active in June. I don't much about this supercomputer, so my comment only applies to the Tianhe-2.
zerohp 10y ago
As someone who spends a lot of time studying computer architecture, I'm skeptical about this machine because of its interconnect design and memory bandwidth. It seems to be optimized specifically for LINPACK. Many people are critical of that benchmark and some labs refuse to participate in Top 500 because of it. From [1]: >However, as we know LINPACK does not tell the whole story. On the HPCG benchmark, Sunway TaihuLight reported only .371 petaflops, which is .3 percent of peak. Compare this with 0.580 petaflops on Tianhe-2 (1.1 percent of peak) and .322 petaflops on Titan (1.2 percent of peak). RIKEN’s K computer reports 0.460 HPCG performance, 4.1 percent theoretical peak. 1: https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunway/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunwa... EDIT: To be more blunt, this machine might have more PR value than scientific value.
SEJeff 10y ago
The Linpack benchmark, which is the gold standard for the top500 super computer list you're referring to, can be gamed with a shitload of GPUs. The Chinese computers you're referring to simply have an enormous amount of GPUs. These aren't generalized computers, but quite specialized one. It is quite historic on its own, but the utility isn't quite what you might expect.
- zerohp 10y ago
  A system built with the same peak flops using GPUs would actually be more useful than what they built. The Sunway TaihuLight processing elements have 64KB scratchpad, no data cache, and have less memory bandwidth than Nvidia Fermi (7 years old.) For most applications the processing elements will be so starved for data that they are just an idle waste of energy. http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-report-2016.pdf http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...
jomamaxx 10y ago
"China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect." How laughable. Is anyone in the world using a Chinese based OS? Is anyone outside of China really even using a Chinese OS derived from American ones? Is anyone in the US really using Chinese software? Can you name any big Chinese products or services that we use in the West besides cheap commodity stuff?

bradleyjg 10y ago

You left out the espionage part of the technology transfer equation.

chillydawg 10y ago
You don't need much espionage when western companies are literally sending specs for their products to be manufactured in China.
- jazzyk 10y ago
  Or are forced to set up joint ventures with Chinese companies as a condition of entering the Chinese market. After a few years, once the technology transfer/know-how has been transferred, the joint venture is dissolved.
- danielrhodes 10y ago
  I visited an Airbus factory and on the floor were dozens of pallets filled with parts ready to be loaded on a ship headed for China. The tour guide said that in order for big orders of Airbus planes to be made from China, Airbus had agreed to do final assembly in China. Boeing on the other hand, he smirked, did not agree to this and subsequently didn't get the orders (this has since changed and Boeing is doing the same, just not final assembly). It was pretty obvious to me why Boeing would not have wanted to do this, but Airbus didn't seem to have the same reservations. I will bet that in 5-10 years, China will start manufacturing its own airplanes.
  - notfromhere 10y ago
    Airbus is going to regret that decision. The old adage about capitalists selling the noose that hangs them holds true
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      Meh. Building an airplane isn't that hard anyways, China will get there soon if they aren't already (e.g. with the C919). It is very difficult to build avionics and jet engines that work, which are just shipped whole sale in final assembly. It will take China much much much longer to replicate that technology, and final assembly rights aren't going to help much at all.

flexie 10y ago

A lot of the consumer tech I like the most is Chinese made: laptops, smartphones, cars, drones. Another decade of this trend and China will have all production engineering knowledge in the world and the US and Europe none. Maybe China stacks the cards in its home market, but its not like the US (and other Western countries) doesn't.

ptero 10y ago
China IMO has mastered efficient (low cost) scalable production of standard components. This is the ticket for mass produced consumer tech. Low wage was one of the big drives of this which might change in the near/mid term. If the age of custom built products does appear this may put another damper on China insustrial production growth. In either case, next 10-15 years should be very interesting, hopefully in a good way (disruptions that are uncomfortable, but not crippling and lead to better setup in the end).

LiweiZ 10y ago

I hold a similar view. My nation now is heavily incentivized by shallow copy with little for deep copy. I just want to know what would happen next. Perhaps the context change on the global stage would break the balance and force a player to seek risky actions and...

erdevs 10y ago

It seems to me that China outplayed the West here by a wide margin. For some reason, the West has let China get away with extremely protectionist trade policies the likes of which no one else in the world would dare even attempt. I think this was a combination of fear that isolating China vs creating a high degree of economic interdependence could lead to war down the line, and a lack of control over Western companies who sought to break into China. The situation today is deeply concerning. I think Western nations need to take dramatic action to curb / disincent China's protectionist policies and let their market open up to the rest of the world. If they won't truly do so, then the West needs to respond in kind.

LiweiZ 10y ago
The interests for both parties are now interlocked and the stakes are very high. So things are not that simple. Change will be gradual till a tipping point.
tiatia 10y ago
> It seems to me that China outplayed the West here by a wide margin. Don't worry, the game is not over yet. >For some reason, the West has let China get away with extremely protectionist trade policies the likes of which no one else in the world would dare even attempt. Yes. But this could be changed by Trump in one day. (Sorry, I know that this is an extremely liberal board). Chinese don't believe in win-win. They believe in win-lose. Thats great but in my experience there is a point where you run out of stupid people to screw over. Also, it is difficult to do business with Chinese. Why? Because a lot of their decisions are irrational and it is extremely difficult to have an opponent that does irrational decisions. But this will backfire or is backfirering already. Why? With 10 or 12% growth you can afford to make irrational decisions. But try this at 6,5 or 4 percent growth. Good luck with that.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > Yes. But this could be changed by Trump in one day. OH really? How will he do that?

noonespecial 10y ago

I'm hoping a genuine, knock-down drag-out economic competition will get an American president back up on the podium saying stuff more like "We choose to go to the moon" instead of this useless, vague "great again" nonsense.

n00b101 10y ago
> saying stuff more like "We choose to go to the moon" So ... building space missile technology for a cold war arms race?

guelo 10y ago

The US government is completely dysfunctional and corrupt at this point and is unable to muster any kind of coherent trade policy. This has allowed China to outmaneuver US repeatedly. This is most obvious recently in the Boeing deal where they are going to build a factory in China and give away all there knowhow after congress refused to reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import Bank, blocked by one senator. See here http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/business/international/a-single-senator-stymies-the-export-import-bank.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/business/international/a-s...

chrischen 10y ago

You make it sound like the West consciously decided to outsource to China. This is not the case, and the West would not have had the unity to be able to consciously do such a thing. Simple market dynamics caused this, albeit caused by market manipulation on China's part. China buys US debt, lowering the value of the Chinese dollars to the US dollar, making stuff in China dirt cheap.

legulere 10y ago
International trade isn't a free market in the typical sense, and countries are the largest actors.
hollerith 10y ago
Uh, the US government's granting China most-favored-nation trading status was certainly a conscious decision, and China would not be as far along economically if the decision had gone the other way. (Driving a wedge between China and the Soviet Union was the main reason behind the decision IIUC.)

jgroch 10y ago

(edited) xxx....xxx (end-edit) ref. Yale (wash your hands aftah ya piss...lol). FacebookIsEvil $C$C$C....CCC...ccc... ... __ _ '

muddyrivers 10y ago

Uber and Google are very different cases. They, as tech companies, are also different cases from consumer companies. Detailed analysis are required to gain insights on why they succeed or failed. In short, Google posed a thread to the government and the political system. If it was allowed to run freely, it will break the restrictions and the controls the government has been trying to impose on the internet. So the government can't afford to have Google freely spread information, etc. Uber doesn't impose such a threat. In my opinion, Didi simply outperforms Uber. I use Uber and Lyft in USA. Last summer I was in China and tried Didi and Uber on purpose. I think Didi's app was easier to use, had better design, more integrated to other services, and had more drivers. I talked to the drivers. My general impression was that the drivers were more content at working with Didi. This was especially true when issues occurred. Didi were more eager to work with drivers to get issues resolved, while some drivers complained that Uber was kind of condescending, treated drivers less well. As for traditional consumer companies like Walmart, etc. cutting costs was their primary goal, IMHO. When one complains about cheap products from China, has she/he thought about supply and demand? If the demand for such cheap products is low, will the companies continue making them? For example, there are high-quality hand-made silk, linen, cotton clothes in China, I don't think the big companies are interested in them. The market for high-end stuffs is always small. Most people would prefer to buy high-end stuffs on well-established brands, like those in France, Italy, etc. It takes time to build such a brand. So it is not as profitable to cheap products. Due to the drastic disruption before 1980 in China, Chinese start to build high-end products only in last several years. It will take at least another 20 years, IMHO, for such products to mature in both quality and design, and be recognized. We have some cotton fabric hand-made by my wife's grandmother, in traditional ways. After 40 years, they are still both soft and sturdy (of course, we don't use them that often, since they are so precious for us.) It feels just so good, much better than those very good quality beddings one can find in department stores here. You won't find such products in department stores, though. That is my point.

jgroch 10y ago

"It's a big boy's game for large nation states...." The Koreans have a saying: "...like a shrimp between two whales...."

qiqing 10y ago

Relevant: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/u-s-imposes-dumping-duties-on-imports-of-chinese-solar-goods http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/u-s-impose... '“Economically counterproductive tariffs have artificially made solar panel prices in the U.S. the most expensive in the world,” Shah said. CASE was formed to represent most of the U.S. solar industry against the petition. Solarworld AG, a German company with a factory in Oregon, persuaded the Commerce Department in 2012 to apply tariffs on imports of solar cells from China.'

hourislate 10y ago

I am always amused how people disregard the largest transfer of wealth that has ever occurred. China is responsible for the theft of trillions of US tax payers dollars through their incessant hacking and stealing of technology. From the US Military to private companies, there is no limit to their State Sponsored theft. I'm not even going to include what the have stolen from Europe. We can talk about barrier to entry but the real problem lies in unabated theft.