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Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
- sanxiyn 9y agoThis is VIA Technologies. Details here: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/via-chinese-x86-soc-2019,36209.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/via-chinese-x86-soc-2019,36...
- gaius 9y agobut its chips don’t make it out of the country because they’re largely used in products built for the Chinese government. Very wise of them. Right now the UK needs to make a serious push to make ARM our primary choice, and fabbed here too. This is as strategic as nukes.
- dogma1138 9y agoIt's too late for that ARM is no longer a UK company.
- madez 9y agoThe argument of national security goes a long way.
- pjc50 9y agoIt certainly goes a long way towards redirecting money to favoured state companies and building protectionist barriers, yes. Whether it provides any actual security is another matter.
- klodolph 9y agoAre you aware of historical events like the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion? It was allegedly caused by sabotaged software inserted by a Canadian company on behalf of the CIA. Modern chips are certainly dense enough and have enough layers that you can hide Trojans in them. Buying e.g. routers with Chinese ICs is a credible threat to the US government.
- kogepathic 9y ago> Modern chips are certainly dense enough and have enough layers that you can hide Trojans in them. Buying e.g. routers with Chinese ICs is a credible threat to the US government. Why bother hiding the malware in hardware? Most electronics are made in China these days anyway, and only a very, very small fraction of users ever replace or investigate the firmware on their devices. Much easier and cheaper just to load a compromised firmware during manufacture and snoop that way.
- klodolph 9y ago> …only a very, very small fraction of users ever replace or investigate the firmware on their devices… Remember that the users we are talking about here are US government agencies. Yes, they do investigate firmware. Yes, they do code reviews of your firmware source code. No, they won't let you just ship them a Chinese router with factory firmware on it.
- pjc50 9y agoThere's a strange little collaboration between BT, GCHQ and Huawei going on at "Adastral Park" (Martlesham Heath). It's all top secret, but the person who told me about it hinted that it wasn't about removing the surveillance backdoors but making sure that GCHQ had access to them.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThe explosion happened because Soviets stole control software and tried to run it on their system.
- klodolph 9y agoThe software was not stolen, it was purchased from a Canadian company. The explosion happened because of the CIA's sabotage efforts.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThis (and many other sources online) claim that the Soviets stole it from a Canadian company: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1455559/CIA-plot-led-to-huge-blast-in-Siberian-gas-pipeline.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1... Basically, the CIA learned that the Soviets were looking for this software, and got the Canadian company to plant a bug in it before the soviets could steal it.
- lurr 9y agoIt works as well as "think of the children".
- sanxiyn 9y agoYou mean ARM Holdings plc, a wholly owned subsidary of SoftBank Group Corp.?
- gaius 9y agoWell, quite. Didn’t the US block the sale of MIPS to a Chinese buyer?
- keltor 9y agoIt wouldn't really matter anyways since the Chinese have been making MIPS64 chips for more than a decade. The current high end chip in China is actually new arch based on the DEC Alpha.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Proven 9y agoStatist nonsense
- talideon 9y agoEven before Softbank bought them, ARM weren't even a fabless operation: their whole business model is IP cores. There's very little strategic value in that; you'd be as well off founding a semiconductor manufacturer to build RISC V processors.
- jotm 9y agoDrumming up national security for the UK? I guess if you're planning to go to war with the EU... Otherwise it's as useless as Trident.
- Nokinside 9y agoIt's a joint venture with municipal government of Shanghai as the article says. Zhaoxin Semiconductor is Chinese government funded and part of the National Integrated Circuit Industry Development Program.
- djsumdog 9y agoAh, the old VIA chips, which VIA built from the tech they bought from Cyrix. If you're interested in the history of Cyrix and some of the older x86 compatible chips, here's a great video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWGAdoMz1c0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWGAdoMz1c0 Also these Zhaonix's are just 32-bit right? I didn't seen anything on the site about supporting x86_64.
- andyana 9y agoNo, they mention 32/64 on the specs pages.
- aidenn0 9y agoVIA's CPUs were from their purchase of Centaur Technology, not fro Cyrix, right? (IIRC there is a HNer that worked at Centuar for a while, perhaps they can expand).
- rzzzt 9y agoThe C3 does seem to be from Centaur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C3
- pharrington 9y agohttp://en.zhaoxin.com/ZXC.aspx?seriesid=3 http://en.zhaoxin.com/ZXC.aspx?seriesid=3
- krylon 9y agoMy first PC had a Cyrix CPU, a P166+, running at 133MHz. PC vendors building middle- to low-end PCs liked them, because they were cheaper than Intel, and for most stuff people did with their PCs back then, it offered acceptable performance. Unless you wanted to play Quake, that is. ;-) But the integer performance of these chips was rather impressive. The other problem was that Cyrix CPUs used more power than Intel's, so they generated more heat and therefore needed a better cooling system. PC vendors often used cheap low-end fans that were well-suited for Pentiums, but caused many, many crashes due to the system overheating. Once I replaced the fan with a bigger one, the crash-rate dropped by about 90%.
- rasz 9y agoThis is also fake news, aka propaganda. Do you remember that 4 core 2GHz Via cpu from 2015? or maybe that 8 core 2016 one? All paper products https://www.pcgamesn.com/sites/default/files/VIA%20CPU.jpg https://www.pcgamesn.com/sites/default/files/VIA%20CPU.jpg
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoThe page says "Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China", but other sources suggest that their cores are derived from Centaur microarchitecture. Anyone know what the truth is on this?
- trollian 9y agoAccording to the official One China Policy the island of Taiwan is a province of China. So yeah, maybe it all depends what your definition of "China" is...
- sanxiyn 9y agoVIA bought Centaur, so you can argue that, tenuously. VIA is a Taiwanese company. Some people insist that being Taiwanese is being Chinese.
- Coding_Cat 9y agoTaiwan insist it's Chinese. Its government claims to be the rightful government of the whole of China.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoThe People's Republic of China and the Republic of China both agree there is a single China which includes Taiwan. They differ over who should govern it.
- hangonhn 9y agoThe new current Taiwanese administration has not confirm that the 1992 Consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Consensus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Consensus The Chinese government has been engaging in some saber rattling because of that.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoNot all Taiwanese are pro republic of China. There is a huge split in Taiwan between mainlanders (post 1949) and natives (also descended from the mainland, just pre 1949).
- sharemywin 9y agoI surprised most cpu chips don't have government back-doors in them.
- TwoNineA 9y agoIntel ME?
- jjawssd 9y agoARM Trustzone http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzone/ http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzon... AMD PSP http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/security http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/s...
- jjawssd 9y agoFixed URL: ARM Trustzone https://www.arm.com/products/security-on-arm/trustzone https://www.arm.com/products/security-on-arm/trustzone
- dschuetz 9y agoThose mentioned are surely just convenience features ;) to believe that a single intelligence agency might exploit them in some way is clearly a conspiracy theory! ;) ;)
- yakitori 9y agoHasn't it been established that most chips have backdoors? I remember reading an article about that HN a while back. That's why china, russia, etc are trying to develop their native cpus. Also, isn't this why sensitive US agencies don't allow chinese made hardware?
- ataturk 9y agoRemember export-quality encryption? Yeah...
- vasili111 9y agoDo they have meltdown and/or spectre bug?
- deepnotderp 9y agoThey have spectre, any CPU with speculative execution and caches of any sort (excluding some capability machines, no ROP exploit machines and PLB enforced SASOS machines), including branch prediction (!) is vulnerable to spectre. (For those of you not in comp arch, that roughly translates to "literally every single non embedded CPU, and then some") That's what makes the flaw so deep and troublesome.
- qwerty456127 9y agoYet another 80386 on steroids with no 64-bit and no SSE or a real modern CPU capable of running all the today OSes and apps efficiently?
- fishmeat 9y agoIs this libreboot friendly?
- jlebrech 9y agowhich socket is it?