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China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in government computers: Report
- downrightmike 3y agoDoesn't really matter, ARM and Nvidia chips are the future.
- zamadatix 3y agoI think the point is more the "deemed safe" list being completely domestic than the idea of whether said companies are the future of chips or not.
- bushbaba 3y agoHow is arm / nvidia any safer?
- amelius 3y ago[flagged]
- usui 3y ago> CEO of nVidia is a Chinese guy. Perhaps the Chinese view them as safer because of this. Are you kidding? Please fact-check strong assertions like that. Jensen Huang is Taiwan-born and so is cousin-related AMD CEO Lisa Su, also Taiwanese, which even if the hypothesis of Taiwan-connected people being safer (due to more Chinese relationships) was true, then there would be no need to issue a curtailment on AMD chips in government computers.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y agoIt is going to sound a little weird, but some people have trouble understanding complexities of ethnicity, country of origin, its intersection with local history, religion and so on ( my wife struggled hard with this ). Some people see Huang as Chinese, the same way they may see me as European. It might be technically true ( and it does betray some perspective a person may have on the subject ), but it happens to ignore some reality on the subject ( as in, how does Huang see himself ). I guess what I am saying is that it is an easy ( if a little lazy ) way to label people.
- amelius 3y agoNo, I just didn't read past the word Chinese on Wikipedia, but it referred to language, not nationality. My bad.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y agoOccam's razor. I withdraw my original diatribe then. edit: On my end, apologies for assuming.
- aragonite 3y agoThere's the anthropological concept of "Chinese" and then there's the identitarian notion. This is analogous to biological versus identitarian notions of gender.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y agoInteresting comparison, but I don't want to get into that particular minefield today. Would say it is possible to be an American today without having appropriate documentation declaring that? Likewise, is it possible to be not an American ( not uphold its values ) and be properly documented?
- aragonite 3y ago"American" is not an anthropological category, though. Consider how odd "ethnically American" sounds to the year. Compare that with "ethically Chinese", "ethnically Indian", "ethnically Korean". "American" is a geopolitical concept defined in terms of a political entity, the United States (just like "Israeli" is a geopolitical concept defined in terms of the country Israel). This is just a consequence of the fact that America is not a nation state (In this respect compare e.g. the -stan countries of Central Asia, each of which is named after a dominant ethnicity. "Tajik" is not defined in terms of "Tajikistan", rather the reverse is true).
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoTaiwanese American.
- orochimaaru 3y agoJust because they are ethnically Chinese doesn’t mean they are Chinese citizens. Please research before making that claim.
- qwytw 3y agoSo since you can't use Nvidia's chips more or less for anything outside of gaming/ML you're saying that Nvidia will enter the (relatively) very low margin CPU market? Why would they do that?
- TesterVetter 3y ago[dead]
- fsflover 3y agoThey have good reasons for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
- spacephysics 3y agoIt’s the same reason why NSA contracts with intel demanded IME be removed
- autoexec 3y agoI'm surprised that other countries are cool with the it to be honest. Every major nation should be making their own chips.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- prettywoman 3y agoIt's kind of difficult use software for RISC-V processors and even more dificult using *nix. RISC-V is a good option though but only for servers I think
- neverokay 3y agoSo what are all the chips being illegally brought into China being used for? This is like banning the internet for Teenagers. It’s not gonna work.
- logicchains 3y agoProbably for training LLMs.
- alephnerd 3y agoNuclear simulations - not LLMs. I made a pretty in-depth comment chain about this a couple weeks ago [0] and used to be a researcher in the space (both from a policymaking and technical standpoint) [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39515697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39515697
- bilbo0s 3y agoYou've misunderstood their most likely impact target. Their goal is not to prevent regular people from using those chips. This rule does nothing to stop ordinary Chinese from using anything in fact. Their goal is to route billions, over time hundreds of billions actually, to their own chipmakers while those chipmakers develop their capabilities with MIPS and ARM architectures.
- blackhaz 3y agoEffectively forcing their gov't to decouple from the West. Good move. Even if their chips are 30% as effective, it will still work. Lots of pain the rear, but it will work.
- jdsully 3y agoThe USSR had the same strategy. It didn't work back then because the goal posts moved faster than they could march toward them.
- 3y ago
- tianqi 3y agoSo what are the alternatives? Based on current information it seems that there are no domestic product in China that are comparable to these mainstream CPUs.
- logicchains 3y agohttps://www.tomshardware.com/news/loongson-launches-3a6000-cpu-matches-14600k-ipc https://www.tomshardware.com/news/loongson-launches-3a6000-c... they have this, which is apparently comparable to an Intel Core i3, which is probably good enough for most government work.
- not_your_vase 3y agoWell, the hardware, yes. But you are expected to compile your own software... Windows doesn't exist on Longsoon (AFAIK), and no notable distro have ready made image, nor package repository for this arch (not in the west at least. Are there such in China?). You can make it work with not a lot of effort of course, but I wonder if this is really what government folks do in their lunch break.
- yorwba 3y agoUOS reportedly supports Loongson as of 2019 https://cntechpost.com/2019/12/16/china-made-operating-system-uos-adapted-to-popular-software-first-step-to-replace-windows/ https://cntechpost.com/2019/12/16/china-made-operating-syste... Though I found this post from last month https://bbs.chinauos.com/phone/zh/post/17586 https://bbs.chinauos.com/phone/zh/post/17586 where someone complains that UOS isn't updating to Loongson ABI2.0 quickly enough.
- xcv123 3y agoThe Chinese government uses Kylin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Kylin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Kylin
- yencabulator 3y ago
- wejick 3y agoThis will boost more CPU designed and produced in China and probably will be good for consumers in general. I noted there're Longsoon MIPS based, many ARM vendors from china and I remember there's also an AMD based x86 cpu. More players more competition, pick your poison.
- bilbo0s 3y agoThe cynic in me thinks this isn't necessarily good for consumers so much as it is just different criminals who get keys to your back door. Maybe I'm just too negative?
- alephnerd 3y agoThe kinda of CPUs being banned aren't the type that would be used in consumer usecases.
- pokepim 3y ago[dead]
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe ship of Chinese consumers getting spied on sailed a long, long time ago. Pinduoduo got banned by Android as malware (in the US their app is Temu). As far as I know that is exceedingly rare
- bilbo0s 3y agoWay more worried about me being spied on than Chinese users being spied on. And the way this is shaping up, I will be able to be spied on by the US or by China. There will be no option for me to buy hardware free of spying.
- brokenmachine 3y ago>There will be no option for me to buy hardware free of spying. So, just like now?
- kkfx 3y agoIt's logic, since they are complex things running proprietary software BUT I can't really name alternatives that not share the same issues AND perform enough...
- papichulo2023 3y agoThe real problem is not the CPUs but the mobo chipsets. The actual root.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> The real problem is not the CPUs but the mobo chipsets. The actual root. But that actual root (complete with a networking stack etc.) backdoor (sorry: that amazing feature allowing updates we-swear-its-not-a-backdoor) is running the Minix OS on an... Intel chip? So if they ban Intel chips for government use, technically they also ban all these backdoored (sorry, "upgradable") mobos too no!?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eric-hu 3y agoPardon my ignorance, but does “actual root” imply some kind of connection between a Linux root user and the motherboard chipset?
- jpgvm 3y agoProbably not. They are probably referring to root of trust. Though they could also just be referring to "root" as a colloquialism to compromise the system but we are going to go with root of trust for sake of discussion. The motherboard (and associated UEFI/BIOS bits) is responsible for bootstrapping the Secure Boot process, it holds the keys that are used to verify the boot loader etc, which then chain-loads into a signed initramfs and kernel which then would normally decrypt and authenticate the filesystem. This chain of trust only works forwards. If you pwn any link in that chain then everything forward of it is now untrusted. Thus compromising the actual root, i.e the UEFI/BIOS firmware is the ultimate hack. Especially if it can be done persistently and without detection. Now for a normal desktop this doesn't really matter but on something like an EV (basically computer on wheels in Tesla's case atleast) then it really matters. High value military computers wouldn't be much different in this respect.
- 3y ago
- h0l0cube 3y agoHot wars between large economies obviously destroy a lot of wealth, but I’d never considered how bad a protracted cold war could get, especially lacking the asymmetry of the first one
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThe first Cold War was pretty destructive and extremely protracted. In some ways it’s still happening with the same players just different political ideologies.
- h0l0cube 3y agoIt can’t be said that the world’s biggest economy was dependent in any way on the other players last time. Taking China out of the supply chain seems almost quixotic at this stage. Globalization and free trade has enabled so much growth, and also has made the world safer by ensuring codependency of the world’s biggest powers. There’s no way to unwind that without consequences
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805362
- mlindner 3y agoAnd use what instead? Some non-x86 low performance processor?
- mepian 3y agoThe latest Loongsons are more than good enough for office work, at least. For HPC, China already built some of the fastest supercomputers in the world with Sunway processors.
- xcv123 3y agohttps://www.techpowerup.com/316189/chinese-loongson-3a6000-cpu-matches-intel-raptor-lake-ipc https://www.techpowerup.com/316189/chinese-loongson-3a6000-c... Even if the Chinese CPU has half the performance of Intel, it will be more productive than an i7 burdened with Windows 11 and corporate trashware. The Chinese government runs Linux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Kylin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Kylin
- userbinator 3y agoThey have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin
- kotaKat 3y agoI have one! https://valid.x86.fr/xt39rz https://valid.x86.fr/xt39rz It's not great. If you're an information worker from 15 years ago, then sure, this thing has a lot of power to spare for... Office. You can buy one too, for only $79: https://www.newegg.com/p/1VK-01Z8-00004?Item=9SIAZN1FNJ9468 https://www.newegg.com/p/1VK-01Z8-00004?Item=9SIAZN1FNJ9468
- userbinator 3y agoThere's apparently a newer version now, faster but obviously still not competitive with leading-edge Western tech: https://www.techpowerup.com/320504/zhaoxin-kx-7000-8-core-cpu-gets-geekbenched https://www.techpowerup.com/320504/zhaoxin-kx-7000-8-core-cp... But based on the discussions here of people using decade-old machines as daily drivers (including me), for undemanding workloads they may be just fine --- software inefficiency is a big factor, after all. It'd be amusing if this situation causes Chinese software to become more efficient as a result.
- beefnugs 3y agoIt makes it tough for us trying to figure out if it is because: - They are projecting that they know they are shipping backdoors into motherboard all over the world, so they are scared of the same - or else its just paranoia Regardless the simplest way to protect ourselves is major shift into whitelist only network allowance
- dehrmann 3y agoCould just be tit for tat over the Huawei ban.
- squarefoot 3y agoIt is probably safe to assume, until being proven wrong, that every manufacturer adds backdoors controlled by their own government, and consequently governments are suspicious of "foreign" hardware. If that's the case, the real question should be: as a normal citizen, am I more comfortable with a backdoor installed by my own government or any other one that shares information with them, or I would better use something controlled by a foreign country that doesn't share that information and quite likely also doesn't give a damn about who I am and what I do?
- eek2121 3y agoGotta disagree. When you know enough about hardware engineering you'll understand that there are very talented folks around the world and if you released a vulnerable piece of hardware, SOMEONE SOMEWHERE will notice. You could argue that Spectre, etc. are part of that, but I don't think that is the case. This is just retaliation because of all the Taiwan crap, but more importantly, it does not matter as much as many folks think.
- s4mw1se 3y agoIt happens a ton, and the hardware and software supply chains are more fragile than people realize. One book I was reading “Secrets of a Cybersecurity architect” by Brook S.E Shoenfield stated that security starts at the physical port and all hardware must go through integrity checks before it can be used. If my memory servers me right he was one of NSAs first cyber warfare and security architects. I also have retired family that was SVP of Engineering at a major telecom and he said this is a practice they had to implement as well because backbone routers would go missing for three days during shipping and just show up with no excuses for the delay. The book is worth a glance, i never finished but it’s pretty insightful. Additionally, on podcast i will never remember, China circumvents the banned entities list by stealthy acquiring approved chip manufactures and not rebranding, and new ownership adds backdoor into the chips.
- nntwozz 3y agoI guess they're fine with Apple Silicon then?
- mcphage 3y agoDoes the Chinese government use Apple Silicon for their machines?
- partiallypro 3y agoI'm curious how long it will be before they try to do this with Apple silicon and Nvidia.
- alephnerd 3y agoNvidia can't sell in China due to Department of Commerce sanctions, and Apple Silicon was always targeted at consumer applications. This is basically targeting AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon product lines, both of which already can't be sold to the Chinese government due to existing DoD and DoC sanctions. Basically, it's just PR.
- notjulianjaynes 3y ago>Nvidia can't sell in China due to Department of Commerce sanctions I believe they can still do business there, just not sell cards above a (likely somewhat arbitrary) level of performance. There is a Chinese market RTX4090 they recently released for example. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-reportedly-creating-new-rtx-4090-d-dragon-gpu-to-comply-with-us-export-regulations-for-china https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-reportedly-creating...
- alephnerd 3y agoYep! And it's on the chopping block [0]: "That's not productive," Raimondo said. "I am telling you if you redesign a chip around a particular cutline that enables them to do AI, I am going to control it the very next day." [0] Also, it's moreso about the buyers and use case. If it can be used for cutting edge simulations related applications, it will absolutely get controlled. [0] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-about-ai-chip-sales-china-raimondo-2023-12-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-abou...
- notjulianjaynes 3y agoThe current top of the line consumer GPU seems like such a weird metric. I was "Doing AI" on a $300 laptop in 2013. (Running Dragon Naturally Speaking.)
- bee_rider 3y agoI think we’d consider it absolutely nuts in the US if anybody on our side suggested using Loongsons in government computers. So, this seems pretty reasonable to me.
- google234123 3y agoAbsolutely nuts that we allow them to do any business where it isn’t reciprocated - social networks/ internet companies
- brozaman 3y agoAbsolutely, and IMO the EU should be developing our own semiconductors. It seems completely unreasonable to me that one pillar of modern society has to be bought from USA or China and doesn't have a locally sourced alternative...
- bee_rider 3y agoI’d definitely consider it being manufactured in the EU (given the privacy laws and generally responsible nature of some of the governments around this sort of stuff) to be a perk. I don’t really think the US government is spying on us through our “management engines” and that kind of stuff, but it would be a nice perk, to be 100% certain.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoOr at least require things like intel ME to be forbidden on any computer used by the administration, forcing chip makers to provide alternatives.
- underlogic 3y agoI'm surprised they didn't do it sooner. What can you expect the response to be from things like ME? If we can ban tiktok with a straight face they reasonably could ban all US made processors under the secure but with anti competitive cherry logic.
- tw04 3y agoThey already banned Facebook with a straight face a long time ago. And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company. The US is hardly the aggressor on this one. They’ve simply been taking advantage of American greed for several decades and it’s finally catching up to them.
- pokepim 3y agoI think it’s not a facebook ban per se but more like set of regulations (like no nsfw content and so on) that you need to meet to operate a business in the country. Facebook couldn’t care to meet those rules so they aren’t allowed to operate. Apple, Tesla and thousands other american businesses can still operate.
- bdd8f1df777b 3y agoIt was that in the beginning. Then Zuckerberg had a change of heart and was willing to cooperate with the Chinese authorities on censorship and came to Beijing multiple times to express his newfound friendliness. Yet the Chinese government still shunned him. Not sure why.
- ethbr1 3y agoBecause the CCP understands network effects and first mover advantage. And they see a locally-owned social network that can be repurposed for government surveillance/control as a strategic priority. Facebook obeying the rules today is less important than Facebook being compliant with (and quiet about) whatever edict is handed down next year.
- chasil 3y ago>foreign-made database software China is also beating the living daylights out of everyone else on TPC benchmarks. It seems like western software firms don't care anymore. https://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results5.asp?print=false&orderby=tpm&sortby=desc https://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results5.asp?print=fal... https://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results5.asp?resulttype=all&version=3 https://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results5.asp?resu... https://m.slashdot.org/story/361786 https://m.slashdot.org/story/361786
- starspangled 3y agoNo, not about TPC-C. Hardware firms neither. The last hurrah for it was the fight between Itanium and PowerPC and then everybody stopped caring. It devolved into a benchmark where you'd get another % performance for every cache miss you saved from the SCSI / block IO request stack. It was totally IOPs bound, so they loaded up these huge machines with literally tens of thousands of hard disks that cost millions to run, and come out with some number that really wasn't very relevant. Actually I heard toward the end even the smaller 4 socket machines were driving tens of thousands of HDDs, so who knows what the 16/32 socket ones required. I think PCI attached NAND promised to (and did) vastly reduce the cost of the hardware, because the test is pretty well IOPs-bound, but they were still very expensive, and interest had already been waning, so it didn't turn that around.
- miked85 3y agoNo real reason to use Intel or AMD since they already stole all the tech.
- hodder 3y agoAre GPUs not listed simply because there is no workable alternative at the moment? Presumably they are going to attempt that next if/when anyone can make a workable alternative to Nvidia chips?
- juancn 3y agoWhen facing an advanced adversary such as China, embargoes can backfire badly. Short term, you may annoy them for while, but you better use that time wisely, long term, your embargo may be the forcing function that makes them even more advanced. Granted, there may not be other politically palatable options available, but it's nonetheless risky. The Loongsons or Kirins may be not a huge threat now, but think of Japan in the 20th century, where it turned from barely competent, almost rural country to a tech powerhouse in a few decades. I read this tit for tat behavior as proof that the US embargoes may end up just making their own companies less competitive.
- nradov 3y agoJapan eventually ran into structural limits and growth has been stalled for many years. Out of the 100 largest companies in the world, only a couple are Japanese. The country is still doing well enough but has lost the ability to produce disruptive innovations. Expect the same thing to happen to China. If they can avoid another violent revolution, that is.
- mrtksn 3y agoWhy does it matter to have x number of companies in top 100 or something? People repeat the same lines for Europe too but both in Japan and EU people live longer, healthier lives and the life quality in general isn’t any lower than the US or China. What if giant corporations isn’t the metric to measure success?
- nradov 3y agoFeel free to use other metrics if it makes you happy. The point is that there is no historical basis to expect that technology embargoes against China will make them stronger over the long term. They are facing severe demographic and economic challenges, and will be hard pressed just to maintain their current levels let alone achieve major increases.
- mrtksn 3y ago