I 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.
Absolutely, 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...
I’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.
I'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.
They 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.
> And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company.
Your information is out of date. This has been progressively phased out over the last 30 years, and is no longer required in most industries. Just to give you an example, Tesla fully owns its operations in China.
I 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.
It 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.
> They already banned Facebook with a straight face a long time ago
Zuckerberg himself said in his 2019 speech that they don't operate in China because "we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there." American tech companies absolutely can operate in China if they agree to abide by local censorship rules (like Bing is doing for China, like Google was going to do with Dragonfly, or like YouTube is doing for India). Facebook also has a substantial ad business in China [1]
> And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company.
> A large majority of new foreign investments in China are WFOEs [wholly foreign owned enterprises], rather than JVs. As Chinese legal entities, WFOEs experience greater independence than ROs, are allowed exclusive control over carrying out business activities while abiding by Chinese law and are granted intellectual and technological rights.
> WFOE refers to a limited liability company that is 100% invested, owned by foreign investors, and independently operated. Almost 60% of foreign-owned companies are WFOEs, making it the most adopted business type. Famous multinational companies such as Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and General Electric are all examples of WFOEs.
[1] > Facebook sells more than $5 billion a year worth of ad space to Chinese businesses and government agencies looking to promote their messages abroad, analysts estimate. That makes China Facebook's biggest country for revenue after the United States, which delivered $24.1 billion in advertising sales in 2018 (https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/07/facebook-makes-a-new-ad-...)
This includes Chinese national security law which is far more invasive than the US law. The party can order a company to do anything they want, or make any physical places they want available to them, and everything is kept under permanent gag order.
> The U.S. government can also demand user information from online providers through National Security Letters, which can both require providers to turn over user information and gag them from speaking about it
> By using NSLs, the FBI can directly order companies to turn over information about their customers and then gag the companies from telling anyone that they did so. Because the process is secret, and because even the companies can’t tell if specific NSLs violate the law, the process is ripe for abuse.
It's worth noting a very, very large difference: the US cannot compel companies to build things. They can secretly obtain some information, but they can't secretly require backdoors, tracking tools, etc.
> This includes Chinese national security law which is far more invasive than the US law
Does anyone have links and translations or shall we all just conjecture in a fact free way? All the above might be true or might not, but there isn’t a way to evaluate the claims.
It is disingenuous for you to refer to "Chinese law". The reality is that there is no rule of law or independent judiciary in China. The law is whatever order CCP officials issue.
No, 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.
When 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.
Japan 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.
Why 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?
Feel 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.
I don't know what will happen to China but both China and US have high hitters in the TOP100 lists and both have lower life quality than EU and Japan. What if giant corporations aren't predictor of anything but problems?
Giant corporations don't actually innovate much, the thing about them is that they can extract money from the society without doing much innovation. They are bean counters. Having the biggest bean counters isn't as cool as a TOP100 lists imply. If you read closely, you will notice that TOP100 lists are curated by some bean counting metrics, not innovation or anything like that. TOP100 by capital is where innovation goes to die. The best they can do is to buy startups and try to stay relevant when actual inventors invents stuff.
yeah yeah yeah this is the standard Peter Zeihan thesis that the cool kids on Youtube and Geopolitics forums love to tout. What they fail to acknowledge is that the Chinese are extremely proud and nationalistic and if you look at any industry you can think of from nuclear to semiconductor to even animation they are determined to out compete the US and they continue to post impressive gains in such a small amount of time. Their work ethic is just astounding. Not even Hollywood or Starbucks is safe. I wonder what the Chinese McDonalds will be?
Maybe the steam will run out in 20 years due to demographics and they sink to the bottom of the ocean. Maybe Xi Jinping really did mess up taking over as supreme leader and we will see the consequences play out in the next 20 years. However, those 20 years will still be absolute hell for the US and their allies (lets be honest the US is the only real player). They may very well drag the US down to the bottom of the ocean with them by outclassing them at literally everything. The US is not some perfectly run paradise and it has severe issues that it did not have in the last challenge to its supremacy. We will see how things turn out.
>The Loongsons or Kirins may be not a huge threat now,
Anyone who thinks CPUs allegedly on par with 10th gen Intel (or even a 14600K?!) and practical implementations of 7nm nodes are not huge threats is, sincerely, fucking delusional.
And assuming the claims are hot air and they're more on par with 6th gen Intel or thereabouts, anyone who thinks that's not a huge threat is, sincerely, still fucking delusional.
I think a lot of people, including those who really should know better, aren't realizing just how much processing horsepower even 6th gen Intel really has.
Of course, if those people also don't consider China a hostile in the first place, then I will grant their logic would make sense.
So 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.
Well, 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.
Office computers do not need high end CPUs. In fact, I know that several places have so old computers (with Intel chips) that they are probably slower than modern day Chinese processors.
I was sort of expecting at least one RISC V CPU to be on the list, but I guess we're still several years out from competing w/ Intel or ARM designs. And there's significant investment in MIPS toolchains, so maybe RV64 isn't quite ready for prime time in China?
It needs to be fabricated by TSMC. Domestic fabrication capabilities haven't caught up yet and are currently at the same level as Taiwan, SK, and the US around 2014.
7nm chips are fabricated in China by SMIC. It is used in latest Huawei 5G phones. They may also be able to make 5nm in near future. Beyond that I don't know.
From observation of the Chinese government, I'm pretty sure they already have an alternative to these Intel CPUs. They're just creating the legal framework to require their use.
This 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.
Way 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.
> 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!?
if you're a fan of DEFCON it has been found that there are weirdo instructions on an unnamed x86 CPU that activate some sort of secondary RISC core with completely different instructions. it's not unreasanable to hypotheticate that such secret cores may exist on modern processors, and may be hidden by more than some weirdo instruction i.e. run these 18 instructions in a row with these register values and these memory values at these addresses and this timing, and then and only then will the suber secret risc core activate
There were a few non-US companies making chipsets for PCs back in the late 90s/early 2000s --- VIA, SiS, ALi, UMC, Winbond, etc. I'm sure China has the resources to make its own.
Probably 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.
"root" has come to mean "unrestricted access", e.g. "to root" = "to gain unrestricted access". In this case, it most likely refers to a network connected hardware subsystem that can pause the main CPU and access its state freely.
You'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.
The issue will be if it is channeled into effective investments or into graft. Pork is definitely an issue in the west. In China it’s next level.
The other issue is that hundreds of billions is peanuts compared to free market and global governmental investment.
It’s akin to the US government saying they’re going to develop their own operating systems and architectures via subcontractors. Most people would assume it’s doomed instantly.
I sort of expect this is window dressing and isn’t practically meaningful. Telling an entire mega-enterprise like a major nations bureaucracy to somehow get all their software and processes onto a bespoke architecture and operating system is absurd. The software ecosystem doesn’t exist, and the existing software used today obviously doesn’t run on the new stack. If they actually enforced this processes would need to degenerate to paper trails for a decade or more as everything is either cross compiled and debugged or rewritten from scratch.
Server portions probably run on Linux, though, which the phone also runs. And most business software written in the last 25 years assumes a web browser for a client.
Yes, there's a lot of software outside that box but quite a lot in it, we're not talking about the soviets starting from first principles.
> It’s akin to the US government saying they’re going to develop their own operating systems and architectures via subcontractors. Most people would assume it’s doomed instantly.
> In China it’s next level.
And yet, somehow, China gets things done and the USA doesn't.
I honestly don't know how much corruption goes on and how much grifting there is in those processes, but their infrastructure, manufacturing, and overall tech are literally next level compared to America.
I have no worries they'll achieve their goal of CPU independence.
Because graft and corruption works - look at the rise of fabrication in China despite just about every single vendor other than SMIC or YMTC collapsing due to misappropriation of funds and embezzlement (eg. Tsinghua Unigroup)
The American military procurement system is extremely ossified by regulations made in the aftermath of the 1980s-90s procurement corruption scandals [0]
Ironically, the US holds its lawmakers to a higher standard around graft than those in peer countries like France (Chirac, de Villipen, Mitterand), Israel (Netanyahu, Deri), Germany (Von der Leyden, Scholz), Canada (Bombardier, LaValle), or the UK (Johnson, Sunak), let alone countries like China.
This has lead to compliance overload which severely narrows down the potential pool of vendors.
For example, on the cybersecurity side - no startup even attempts to become FedRAMP certified until they are at Series E or above, as it's a multi-year process that swamps your platform and development team, and costs around $7-10M ime.
Yet FedRAMP is nowhere near as painful as other procurement and compliance systems that other parts of the Defense industry need to face.
China is largely a success story for foreign investment. Its prowess is almost entirely borrowed/extorted/stolen with little to no domestic expertise. I don’t mean this out of spite, but the best and brightest of China have left and leave. Very few repatriate and with the current climate that’s not reversing it’s accelerating. Most of the high tech in China is actually western, Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese expertise and built staffed with Chinese labor. It’s certainly true their infrastructure as far as rail goes and other mass investment is top notch, but it’s not very productive. It’s also incomparable to compare China, which has only recently developed its infrastructure, to nations who have been building their modern infrastructure for over a hundred years. Legacy can weigh anyone down in so far as adoption. But last time I checked you don’t find self driving cars tooling the streets of China, all their top fabrication equipment is imported, and all of their official statistics of growth etc are almost entirely fabricated to the extent it’s unknowable how progressed they are other than it’s not as much as they claim.
The flight of foreign investment out of China is going to be sobering as it accelerates faster and faster. The Silk Road projects are bankrupt, the real estate bubble is finally popping, etc. My real worry is the upcoming instability leads to military adventurism.
Effectively 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.
This is something the Xi Administration is fine with. His administration is largely traditionalists within the CCP, who are apathetic to market capitalism due to a couple very high profile corruption scandals in the 2000s and early 2010s.
Market size of USSR was tiny compared to Chinese market size. Also, USSR was a socialist country with plan economy, China is capitalist economy. It's incorrect to compare China to USSR.
Seems like a pretty achievable target. The US does this same thing at even larger scales for materials used in federal construction projects—the contractors are responsible for ensuring that (almost?) all materials are sourced from the US and are required to provide documentation to prove it. If the US can do it for everything in a building down to the bolts and screws, I have little doubt that China can figure it out for CPUs.
That's the rub. In a country where the ruling party has a significant stake in most core 'private' enterprises, the line between government and non-government is very blurry. Presumably someone in the Chinese government has an opinion on where this line is, or should be, drawn.
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)
It 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
It 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?
Gotta 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.
>The exploit targets Apple A12–A16 Bionic SoCs, targeting unknown MMIO blocks of registers that are located at the following addresses: 0x206040000, 0x206140000, and 0x206150000.
>The prompted me to try something. I checked different device tree files for different devices and different firmware files: no luck. I checked publicly available source code: no luck. I checked the kernel images, kernel extensions, iboot, and coprocessor firmware in search of a direct reference to these addresses: nothing.
>How could it be that that the exploit used MMIOs that were not used by the firmware? How did the attackers find out about them? What peripheral device(s) do these MMIO addresses belong to
I believe it's very easy nowadays to release undetectably vulnerable devices.
It 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.
Are 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?
Hot 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
The first Cold War was pretty destructive and extremely protracted. In some ways it’s still happening with the same players just different political ideologies.
It 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
It'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...
Nvidia 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.
"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.
>U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, speaking in an interview with Reuters on Monday, said Nvidia "can, will and should sell AI chips to China because most AI chips will be for commercial applications."
China doesn't need to do anything to win this New Cold War, we (the US) will lose of our own accord.
> "What we cannot allow them to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models," she added
The Lovelace line is on the newer end, though the RTX4090 is more commercial driven in usecases.
They aren't selling the "most sophisticated, highest-processing power" chips, but they are (and rightfully so given the law) selling sophisticated, high-processing power chips.
When we're beating around the bush refusing to not sell to China while they go and do the deed wholesale on their side, it's a foregone conclusion who is winning this New Cold War and whether it's worth waging it (for us) at all.
Also, it's been well over 24 hours since ComSec gave that "the very next day" statement.
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.
The 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.
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.
> 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.
It 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.
There's the anthropological concept of "Chinese" and then there's the identitarian notion. This is analogous to biological versus identitarian notions of gender.
Interesting 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?
"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).
Is "ethnically American" even a single homogeneous thing though?
How many languages are spoken, how much territory used to be part of the New Spainish lands for how many hundred years, how many diaspora's fed into modern America?
"Native American" itself is a broad spectrum, many past language and cutural groups, many degrees of living on and off reservation lands, many intertwinings with former slaves, ranchers, et al.
I wouldn't say ethnic-group formation happens as soon as the next generation (after the founding generation), but I agree with the larger point. I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple hundred years no one would bat an eye at talk of "ethnically American" or "Norwegian of American descent". My understanding is that that's more or less what happened with the French.
So 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?
