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

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. [0] https://www.servethehome.com/top500-june-2019-our-new-systems-analysis/ https://www.servethehome.com/top500-june-2019-our-new-system... [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hygon https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hygon