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Does A Pentium 4 Need A Weapons License?
WindBourne writes "It appears to be that the U.S. house of Reps. want to classify Pentium 4 and above CPUs as weapons. This would mean that all these will require export licenses. Apparently, they have not heard about that the far east has developed large CPUs as well that are used in beowulf clusters." According to the article, this clause is unlikely to appear in the final version -- but stranger things have happened.
Foreigners could simply obtain SPARC or MIPS specs and fab a multi-GHz version of those. Since these chips are better designed for multi-processing, foreign powers could scale them just as high as a PIV cluster, and run their nuclear simulations. Time to worry more about refined Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It wasn't "the House of Representatives", it was Representative Duncan Hunter, a San Diego Republican who makes Rush Limbaugh look moderate...and that's coming from a registered Republican!
The amendment will never leave the House.
-h-
It was actually the G4 because it was the first processor that could pull a gigaflop.
Well, this already happened to the Powermac G4 back in 1999, since it was considered as a "super computer".
More infos here.
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
Most are manufactured in US; the only foreign countries where they are made are Ireland and Israel. They are packaged in various places around the world (Costa Rica, Malaysia, Philipines, etc.).
Beowulf
)
(www.linux.org.tw/CLDP/OLD/Beowulf-HOWTO-5.html
[tinfoil hat on] And so they want to be only ones with enough juice power to break ciphers/ do research in that area...
But the programmers don't need anything over P3 rihgt? Can play games, can send email, can do sound processing... Can cluster... can send attachments and spam...
On the other hand, some free research arround:
this is being optimized for P4 (open sourced, good good).
this can do 35 million md hashes in a second on a pentium 4.(not quite 35, but read the page)
this breaks des and the approximate time for P4 is 4.3 hours (not quite 4.3 but read the page)
I just wonder, if the hardware industry splits, how much the software world will diverge. Of course, other countries don't have the jump US has in this area, but given enough time, the demand will drive the market....
Laws like this are silly; they don't stop other parties from getting their hands on the export-controlled product. Period.
Kind of reminds me of the laws on bottles of inseciticide which state "It is unlawful to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labelling." or something to that effect. What does my "professional" landscaper tell me? "Oh, I mix these two together in double the concentration to really zap the weeds!" (And no, I didn't let him do that). The law is basically unenforceable. And let's not even talk about posted speed limits! (Guilty as hell on this one). Yes, much more enforceable, and still not all that effective at preventing the behavior (talking percentages here).
To think the law would do anything useful just goes to show how out of touch some of our elected officials are. Is there really nothing else they can think of doing with their time and position of authority?
Sheesh.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
I believe the export restriction would encompas anything the company made and sold within the US. This means that even though it is produced in a foreign country, the distrobution would still be limited if the company continues to operate withing the US.
I also think that if they stoped selling in the US, they would have penatlies included to any other portion of the company that would still operate within the US. It is technicaly inclusive so a companiedoesn't just decide to operate outside the boundries of the US and then import instead of following the rules.
Doh! Quoth the article:
Section 1404 of the appropriations bill would roll back the licensing equation to a level not seen since 1994.
"The President shall require a license...for the export of goods or technologies included on the Militarily Critical Technologies List," Section 1404 of the House bill states. That list cites a level of 1,500 MTOPS as being militarily critical.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Details of locations of Intel-chip factories
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Yes, afaik even it's most modern and biggest one.
Yes it does. "Fab 30" and "Fab 36" are in Dresden. They make the Athlons at "Fab 30". I'm not sure if "Fab 36" makes Athlons or Opterons.
The export restrictions would include the chips manufactured over seas. It would lay criminal penalties against the company and the executives if they knowingly sold to restricted countries even though they were manufactured in another country. The operations still conducting buisiness inside the US would encompass all it's foreign entities. If they pulled up and moved completly out of the ocuntry, then they wouldn't be allow to import again and there would still be a pending charge against them.
This is what has happend with a couple of other technoligies and i belive that someone was actually extradited from a Europe country because they moved and continued to develope thier technoligy and allow forbiden countries to access it. I forget the name and exact place but it was durring the coldwar, Reagan erra. I Think it was somethign that Isreal got ahold of too.
You forgot Japan. Fujitsu makes Sparc's. NEC makes pretty good computers, at least the Earth Simulator seems to be fairly fast...
MOD pARENT TROLL
Athlons have solved their overheating problems ages ago... Now, Prescotts, OTOH...
how long until
The only way to know if a bomb will fission properly (i.e. it will blow up and not just very hot) is to test it.
Well, it's the only way to know 100%, but if competent engineers build a Little Boy (Hiroshima) gun-type bomb, they can be very, very confident without bothering to test it.
The Little Boy bomb design was never tested because it was such a no-brainer that it would work. Built as a back-up to the Fat Man (Nagasaki) implosion type bomb, it was always taken for granted that it would work, while no one was that confident about Fat Man, which was why the design was tested in the Trinity test.
In a gun-type bomb, you take a slug of fissile material with a hole in it, and build a gun into the bomb to literally shoot a fissile projectile into the hole. Nothing could be simpler in principle. You need precision and competence in the design, and you need to know that projectile will assemble into the slug, but not fly right through it, and you need to tend to some details I'm not going to enumerate, but that is pretty straightforward engineering.
Little Boy was not very efficient. It had an 85 lb slug of U-235 and a 55 lb projectile of U-235, with what IIRC was a modification of a common 3" gun to shoot it. Only 1.38% of the U-235 actually fissioned, but that was enough to produce an explosion equal to 15,000 tons of TNT.
Little Boy wasn't very "little" either (10 feet long, 9700 lb). But that isn't much of a package requirement to take out a city with a very high assurance factor.
It always escaped me why the US (or someone else) didn't simply mass produce gun-type bombs, rather than apply the tremendous amount of science and engineering to perfect the implosion assembly type, of which Fat Man was the first design of many.
Fab 30 currently makes all AMD CPUs (Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Opteron, etc.) Fab 36 is under construction next door to Fab 30, but won't even start limited production until H2 2005.
We have a case here where an honor student was seen taking a Motrin tablet for her PMS cramps and the school officials want to send her to an alternative school.
Here's a link to that story for those interested.
You were right :) I just got the wrong key on the numberblock :) 5 and 8 are pretty close.
Centrifuges are quite simple things, basicly large dishes powered for instance by an electro engine. They have some facilities to get the stuff in the center out of the dish parted from the stuff at the rim. You even could use spoons, which are not really high tech. Even the gold miner's bowls from the pioneer's days in the mid 19th century are basic centrifuges. Of course with them you don't get much productivity.
No, the real challenge is to get hold of Uranium ore (Germany has much ore, Central Africa is another place, India has its own ressources...) and the financial and organisatorial effort to sustain the Uranium enrichment. The german group around Heisenberg in Haigerloch in World War II needed one year of processing to create enough 235U for their experiments.
There is still another way: If you take slightly enriched Uranium with still pretty high 238U, you can start a controlled chain reaction by shielding it with cobalt or another neutron reflecting metal, moderate it with water or anthracid and putting in neutron radiation. Part of the 235U will split and send out alpha radiation, which, if caught by a 238U core, will turn it into 241Pu (Plutonium) (and a proton). If the 235U level has sunk beyond a certain level and the chain reaction stops, you can separate Uranium and Plutonium via chemical means, and you get weapongrade Plutonium. This seems to be the process North Corea is using in its nuclear weapons program. Big advantage: You need much less Uranium ore than with pure centrifugation.
heh, it seems a ton of 'internet security' products are produced in Israel... Check Point, Sanctum, Aladdin are a few that come to mind.
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
This is not true on any count. Laws do die. There are "sunshine" provisions to automatically expire laws. Laws get changed: witness what the USA PATRIOT ACT did to all these other laws. Look at all the weird immigration laws that get revised all the time.
And laws are necessary, despite what the parent might think. It keeps a country together to know what rights we each have. But a large country requires a lot of laws. Just think about how much you use each day, from the IP that resulted in your computer to the insurance laws that protect your life, and the traffic laws that keep you alive, presumably. It is complicated and perhaps bad in some instances but definitely necessary. Anything else would be literal anarchy.
Why not lawyers? We need more lawyers in legislatures because they can draft specific bills. Legislatures untrained in the law is the current norm. Look what they have created. Lawyer/legislators are susceptible to the same grafts and pork barrel but perhaps are in a better shape to understand the ramifications of their drafting, vis a vis the Constitution and such. (Witness the COPA, Child Online Protection Act that the Supremes recently knocked down.)
So basically, we need laws. Laws must be complicated to cover all exigencies. Lawyers understand these complexities. Lawyers are suited to writing these complexities.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I've never heard of anything like a "dirty nuke"... Perhaps you mean a dirty bomb (radialogical)?
In that case, assuming a good-sized explosive, in a busy area of NY, the outcome would have been something like 100 killed (how ever many are killed by the conventional bomb), a few dozen people with their hair falling out, and a multimillion dollar clean-up happening around New York.
Frankly, I wish they would have taken that route. Less loss of human life. Less economic damage. So on.
"Dirty" bombs aren't very destructive... They just became the news media's buzz-word for a month because the administration wanting the fear of terrorism to keep up for a while, so they could get everything they wanted.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The article itself (what am I, new here?) mentions that the processing restrictions being proposed would affect any cpu >= ~600mhz pentium 3.
AMD numbers their fabs based on the year they were built. AMD was founded in 1969, so Fab 25 in Austin came online in 1994 (25 years after the founding), Fab 30 in 1999, and Fab 36 is slatted for 2005, so right now Fab 36 isn't making much ;).
I used to work at "Fab 15" although it was owned by Sony at the time. Boy do I miss it.
It always escaped me why the US (or someone else) didn't simply mass produce gun-type bombs, rather than apply the tremendous amount of science and engineering to perfect the implosion assembly type, of which Fat Man was the first design of many.
The gun design requires a lot of refined material, which is expensive. It also doesn't scale. You can make implosion bombs use fantastically small amounts of material, or you can scale their yield up greatly, or use them as the trigger to a fusion bomb, and they will be cheaper to produce (even if more expensive to design) than the gun design. When you're making thousands of them, using less material is a significant gain. When you're planning on using thousands of them in a full-scale war that you want some people to survive, using less material is also a significant gain. And when you want to stick them on top of missiles or inside bombers to launch them at your enemies, making them as small and as light as possible is yet another significant gain.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!