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> I see people -- including Chinese diaspora -- calling for banning Intel. Is this feasible? There's not all that many other options for x86
by hrrsn 5y ago
> I see people -- including Chinese diaspora -- calling for banning Intel.
Is this feasible? There's not all that many other options for x86
- T-A 5y agohttps://www.tomshardware.com/news/dual-chinese-zen-cpu-beat-ryzen-5-5600x-multi-threaded-workloads https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dual-chinese-zen-cpu-beat-...
- FooBarWidget 5y agoI doubt it. China is not there yet w.r.t. semiconductor independence. There are people who say, buy AMD, but AMD is also subject to US laws... So what will happen instead? From what I've seen so far, China is careful with counterattacking US because they know the US is stronger. I think the govt will just issue an angry statement but do nothing concrete internationally, while continuing their domestic efforts of semiconductor development as they already have, and also continuing with restructuring Xinjiang's economy (i.e. replacing foreign customers with domestic customers, as happened with cotton)
- limoce 5y agoThey will choose AMD because AMD doesn't make this statement clear but Intel explicitly mentions "Xinjiang" in its annual supplier letter. I guess AMD did take this factor into consideration.
- e9 5y agoAlibaba recently announced new CPU they developed based on ARM: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/alibaba-unveils-128-core-server-cpu https://www.tomshardware.com/news/alibaba-unveils-128-core-s...
- FooBarWidget 5y agoThere are companies that are competitive in CPU design. But CPU manufacturing is a bottleneck. At the low end, they lack scale (until the new factories are built). At the high end (beyond about 14nm), they either lack an independent supply chain (and are thus susceptible to sanctions) or ability (beyond 10 nm requires EUV). Furthermore, what we're talking about here is replacing x86. There is indeed a joint venture with AMD, but at the end of the day x86 is still US intellectual property and thus susceptible to sanctions. It would be a different matter if they decide to replace x86 wholesale with something else, e.g. ARM or RISC-V. That is certainly more feasible today than a decade ago, with Android being a major platform and no longer being constrained to just Windows. But it's probably still a large amount of effort.
- Symbiote 5y agoI think AMD has less (possibly much less) in China than Intel. I spent about €200,000 on AMD servers last year. They are performing better than Intel ones would have done at the same price, so it was a very easy decision.
- dnautics 5y agoisn't this exactly the opposite? IIRC there was a situation where a large-ish? AMD subdivision in china was nationalized and made off with a considerable amount of AMD IP
- formerly_proven 5y agoYou're probably thinking about ARM, whose Chinese branch unilaterally declared independency from the crown some time ago.
- dnautics 5y agoAh yes, my bad!! Sorry
- colinmhayes 5y agoyou're thinking of ARM