[HN Gopher] China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in governmen...
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China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in government computers:
Report
Author : fnordpiglet
Score : 117 points
Date : 2024-03-24 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.channelnewsasia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.channelnewsasia.com)
| downrightmike wrote:
| Doesn't really matter, ARM and Nvidia chips are the future.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| How is arm / nvidia any safer?
| qwytw wrote:
| 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?
| fsflover wrote:
| They have good reasons for that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
| spacephysics wrote:
| It's the same reason why NSA contracts with intel demanded IME
| be removed
| autoexec wrote:
| I'm surprised that other countries are cool with the it to be
| honest. Every major nation should be making their own chips.
| prettywoman wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| Probably for training LLMs.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Nuclear 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
| bilbo0s wrote:
| 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.
| blackhaz wrote:
| 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.
| jdsully wrote:
| The USSR had the same strategy. It didn't work back then
| because the goal posts moved faster than they could march
| toward them.
| addicted wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| This also further deepens Chinese dependence on the
| government which means the government's on the hook for
| more things.
|
| And the way the Chinese government is doing it they're on
| the hook on both sides, both on the supply and demand
| side.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| anticodon wrote:
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
|
| That seems absurdly unlikely.
| woooooo wrote:
| Xiaomi and Huawei already distribute billions of devices
| not using Intel.
|
| You could take their phones, right now, plug in a keyboard
| and monitor and call it a workstation.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| This is government computer use. I assume their ERP
| software stacks don't run on a cell phone.
| woooooo wrote:
| 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.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > China gets things done and the USA doesn't.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/a
| merica-we...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| You missed this part:
|
| > in government computers
|
| 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.
| tianqi wrote:
| 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.
| logicchains wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| UOS reportedly supports Loongson as of 2019
| 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 where someone
| complains that UOS isn't updating to Loongson ABI2.0
| quickly enough.
| xcv123 wrote:
| The Chinese government uses Kylin
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Kylin
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Current Chinese CPUs have half the performance of current
| Intel/AMD ones.
|
| That's pretty good, especially for office work.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| 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?
| neurostimulant wrote:
| They went hard with ARM, while developing RISC on the side. So
| perhaps something like this: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-
| components/motherboards/firs...
| blackoil wrote:
| Huawei ARM chips were pretty good. Now that they have 7nm out,
| a ARM Linux PC seems feasible.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| The Huawei ARM chips are progression. They are not good. They
| are several years behind in performance.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Is several years behind that large gap? I think most
| apps/infra are fine to run on 10yo hardware
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| wejick wrote:
| 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.
|
| More players more competition, pick your poison.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| The kinda of CPUs being banned aren't the type that would be
| used in consumer usecases.
| mlindner wrote:
| This isn't really good for consumers at all.
| kkfx wrote:
| 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...
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| The real problem is not the CPUs but the mobo chipsets. The
| actual root.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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!?
| eric-hu wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance, but does "actual root" imply some kind of
| connection between a Linux root user and the motherboard
| chipset?
| jpgvm wrote:
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| 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
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805362
| mlindner wrote:
| And use what instead? Some non-x86 low performance processor?
| mepian wrote:
| 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.
| xcv123 wrote:
| 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/Ubuntu_Kylin
| userbinator wrote:
| They have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin
| kotaKat wrote:
| I have one! 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
| beefnugs wrote:
| 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
| dehrmann wrote:
| Could just be tit for tat over the Huawei ban.
| squarefoot wrote:
| 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?
| maskedinvader wrote:
| nit: lets stop using whitelist and switch to allowlist
| exe34 wrote:
| Yes and Spanish should change their word for black, because
| it triggers me.
| nntwozz wrote:
| I guess they're fine with Apple Silicon then?
| partiallypro wrote:
| I'm curious how long it will be before they try to do this with
| Apple silicon and Nvidia.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
|
| Basically, it's just PR.
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| >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...
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yep! 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-abou...
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| underlogic wrote:
| 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| >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=fal...
|
| https://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results5.asp?resu...
|
| https://m.slashdot.org/story/361786
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