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A Chinese Challenge To Intel
motang writes "Chinese government funded Godson-3 a CPU that is developed to bring personal computing to majority of Chinese people by the year 2010. Will this pose any threat to Intel?"
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I'm not an expert but I would guess that a shift to Chinese made chips will be harder on the environment since Chinese pollution laws are generally more lax. Also, if it is pushed by the government, I'm sure they're willing to overlook things. I believe corruption is rife in the People's Republic of China. This is very bad for Intel (and probably AMD, why not?) since there will be a much more cheaply made multi-core CPU available on the market.
Great for the end consumer, however. Possibly even really really good for me as a United States citizen as Intel/AMD will be forced to drop prices to compete in the world market.
Also, there's the 'patriotic' view of this and the fact that the U.S. owes China dearly as a trade partner. Import import import import and export nothing. This would be further propagating that, thus hurting the dollar a tiny bit more.
Oh well, such are the intricacies of world economics.
My work here is dung.
At least nobody said it was a threat to AMD.
Wouldn't the term "Chinese Intel" be an oxymoron.
-- Would this CPU be 16 years old or 14?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
No.
I wonder why they are working on making this CPU x86-compatible. If they want to be really "free" from the western IT-world they don't have to care about running Windows, and when they don't have to care about that, they can just adopt gcc, the rest of GNU and Linux to run natively on their own instruction set.
c++;
"Godson"... The new Jesus chip?
Speaking from PowerPC 970 MP, Quad G5 Mac which has very good FSB specs and way modern compared to CISC stuff, I can easily say "No".
Once you don't support x86 instruction set, you aren't a threat to Intel at all.
It doesn't support, pass. Sorry to sound negative but it is the truth.
If Intel could be threatened by a non x86 chip, Motorola/IBM/Apple could have achieved it. You see what happened, SJobs and Apple became number 1 Intel fan.
About performance and watt usage? There is still a huge company named FreeScale you know ;)
According to the article, "Federal laws also prohibit the export of state-of-the-art microprocessors from the United States to China, meaning that microchips shipped to China are usually a few generations behind the newest ones in the West." Thus, a native Chinese microprocessor project does not need to be state-of-the-art. It just has to be good enough to compete with the older stuff from Intel and AMD. Once the Chinese build up their own knowledge base in microprocessor design, then nationalism and Communism will help foist it upon their populace as they demand computers. It'll be interesting to see how this dovetails with any effort to create Red Flag Linux to move away from the Wintel-opoly.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
This is very bad for Intel (and probably AMD, why not?) since there will be a much more cheaply made multi-core CPU available on the market.
I guess we'll see about that. I did find, however, the best quote ever from TFA
"The decision makers and [Chinese] IT community have come to realize that CPUs [central processing units] are important."
Um...yeah.
You'll have that sometimes...
It's gonna have to be x86-compatible to run all those counterfeit copies of Windows.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Can it run Linux? ;)
I think this will be interesting to watch. It's not like this is the very first challenger to Intel's market. So far none have really succeeded (AMD being the exception, but they aren't exactly considered the czar of the processor world at the moment) aside from niche markets. My guess is that this will be another company that will find its niche and settle for it. Intel just always seems to avoid losing "King of the Hill" status time and time again.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Kinda looks like a Cyrix. We won't be seeing any all-Chinese Alienware boxen anytime soon.
The funny thing is that they're made in China by a Swiss company, then rebranded Chinese. Ya'd think that they'd want to do it the other way around. Must be a national pride thing -- China's motto is "Ours is crappier than yours, but we have so much damn more of it!"
Transmeta has tried, Godson has already tried, and both have yet to make a dent. It's just another knockoff that will not take off.
Like a lot of things from China, reliability will be suspect, not to mention any willful patent infringement.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Except for servers, hard core gamers and maybe very HDTV, once you get off MS' latest core consuming software, who cares about the last 20% of performance? At 2.5 watts per processor core, of which 1-2 cores should run most individual PCs just fine (f--- Vista), who cares an extra $200-$400 about "Intel inside"? Chinese business, students and academia should do just fine.
"to bring personal computing to majority of Chinese people"
Please send Godson-3 to U.S.S.A. so majority of U.S.S.A
proletariat can have personal computing".
Thank you.
P.S.: Don't sell U.S. Treasury bonds yet. Wait until John
McSame is elected, then SELL.
Thanks a lot.
Cordially,
Philboyd Studge
Maybe now the Chinese will stop trying to hack my servers because they're already inside.
Most of the stuff on
Their current chip is basically a pentium 3, without the x86 instruction set. It comes in 500 mhz to 1.2 ghz flavors.
They're even less of a threat than Via and Cyrix were.
Will it pose a threat to Intel? In the short run absolutely not. It will require a truly massive investment, Intel isn't standing still, and the biggest problem is getting enough engineering talent. Furthermore just producing the chip isn't enough, there have to be boards to plug it into, software written to support the chip/boards, etc. True China is producing a lot of engineers but that by itself is entirely insufficient.
Long term - who knows? Talent can be developed/bought/hired, secrets learned/stolen, R&D can leapfrog, etc. It will be very difficult to displace Intel but it certainly isn't impossible. Andy Grove would probably be the first to admit that.
Should it be told to return 16, it will return 16 even if the result is 14. Consider it the Olympic Calculation Extension.
Attempting to write Tibet, Democracy, or anything the PRC deems harmful(via microcode updates) destroys the unit.
(Oxymoron (Score:-1, Troll))
Hrm. I guess the mods have a defective sense of humor here. ...3...2...1...
Supporters of China incoming in
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Hardly balanced but China needs the U.S. as bad as the U.S. needs China. This alone will probably keep the peace.
Why does China need the US again? I must have forgotten.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I don't care who makes the processor - let's face it, most chips in US computers are made in Asian countries anyway - all I need is for it to work well. I doubt the Chinese are doing anything radical (that's not generally their style), which is a pity because current chip designs are going down a dead-end and it'll take a radical shift to solve many of the issues to do with parallelism, increasing abstraction in programming languages, and increasing demand for highly robust software. Serious efforts into such radicalizing of technology can be seen with the IBM Cell design (which isn't going anywhere, at the moment) and could be seen in the Transmeta Crusoe and the Inmos Transputer, and the Manchester AMULET was ingenious enough, but pretty much everything else in the CPU world is based on stale ideas and stagnant approaches. Good for backwards compatibility at the binary level, lousy for long-term potential.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Four or five years ago there was all this buzz about the Chinese Dragon CPU (based on the old Soviet Elbrus) that was going to combine with Red Flag Linux to destroy Wintel. Heard from them recently? The CPU fanboys don't understand that it's not about designing chips; it's about designing chips you can then make.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The U.S. is China's largest buyer. They wouldn't be where they are without all that money flowing that way. If China were to collapse the U.S. economy which is something they could do right now then they would lose a lot of business devastating their own economy in the process. This nearly happened to the U.S. when Japan's market collapsed.
hello.c:
./hello
--
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
char* msg = "Tibet Free!";
printf(msg);
}
--
$ gcc hello.c
$
Segmentation fault.
$
It seems the next logical step for them will be to develop a Chinese-grown OS and "strongly frown upon" use of Windows at home. (While at the same time having their OS support Windows apps) That way they can have the OS report any "dangerous behavior" by default, and roll out any patches or refresh a new "blocking list" daily....
Asian language pedantry: Sayonara is Japanese. You're looking for Zai Jian. 再 見
Actually, from the article, I think this is the dragon cpu (dragonchip in the article)
/not suck/.
And it is being produced.
It also makes the VIA processors look like incredible speed demons.
So the problem isn't being able to make them, but being able to make them
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Even in real (before Gorbachov) communist era, USSR was shipping 8086 compatible chips as far as I searched.
Guess what? They care about Windows, DirectX and millions of x86 centric developers. China has always been a realistic country and even Russia couldn't dare to ship a non x86 small chip. Their mainframes were also DEC/S360 etc. clones. There is even a DEC chip saying "Steal from the best" when looked under electron microscope ;)
Indeed there was: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
Hardly. The US exports $1.15 trillion of goods and services per year. It's true that the US imports $700bln more than it exports. Exports recently rose sharply when the dollar's value was relatively depressed versus European and Asian currencies.
If China would more aggressively re-circulate the $1.5 trillion in reserves it's holding rather than hoarding dollars, the dollar's value would fall relative to the Yuan (which is being artificially under-valued, which China can due to its massive currency reserves). This would make Chinese imports more expensive and US exports less expensive. But then, China's export-driven economy wouldn't be growing at an insane 11% per year.
The current trade imbalance is as much China's "fault" as it is the US'. Maybe things aren't so unilaterally bad. There's some truth in the old saying that "if you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $1 million, the bank has a problem."
You jest, but I would be strongly suspect of buying hardware like this. Given such an opportunity to put in a hardware backdoor into every PC with such a chip, do you really think the PRC would pass?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Off-topic xenophobia here but:
Is there anyone else who is a little worried about this scenario:
There's a major decline in the economies of the first world democratic capitalist societies. The global business and banking communities notice that they're making more profit in the authoritarian society, and they apply their influence to see appropriate changes here. The developing world then gets incouraged toward more democratic and humane forms of social organization?
Is anyone else worried that this is already happening?
I don't think the Chinese are worse than most people in the world. I just think they have a scary form of government that is becoming more and more influential and not really getting more humane or free as their economy matures. It's dangerous for the world to learn that you can make piles of money without freedom.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
This is the third major redesign of the Dragon chip. If you had read the article (haha, slashdot joke etc) you would have seen that apparently with each update they've tripled the performance, or so they say. There's been about 8 updates for the second major design of the chip, they're on 2G or 2H now, with integrated GPUs, and even integrated chipsets (System on Chip).
Godson-3 / Dragon-3 chip will have 4 cores at 5W/core (allegedly) and interface using HyperTransport to a chipset (so they can probably use any compatible chipset from the PC world).
Uhm, because China would collapse immediately without the US buying nearly everything they make.
China will be selling the 4 CPU chip for a fraction of what a 1 CPU chip from intel costs. In addition, it has the ability to shutdown all but 1 core, which leads to really low power requirement. China has been taught how to do all this by companies like Intel.
These chips will show up in small laptops within 2 years and those systems will be sold the world over for under $200. Intel is in BIG trouble in both the short AND long term. In fact, I suspect that Intel AND AMD will be in worse shape than America's steel and car industry within 2 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Any MIPS or ARM at a given price point will run cooler and faster than x86. All x86 processors are RISC with an instruction converter front end, but that's still enough of a liability to make the first sentence true.
From what little I know about this... apparently the x86 instruction format is more compressed - reducing the overall code size. There's a tradeoff on getting code to the processor and efficient execution. If you're executing faster than memory is being copied, then you'll benefit from reduced code size. I believe that's the current situation, allowing x86 to hold its own (do better) than any other architecture.
There's a strange irony to this, because during the 90s, everyone believed that RISC would cream existing x86 chips. What was not accounted for, was that x86 chips would be RISC, with an instruction converter - and the cost of having the convertor is compensated by a more compressed instruction format.
End game: Netbooks with ARM or MIPS spread upward to desktops and servers with ARM or MIPS. x86 finally fades away of software that doesn't care. All hail.
Champaign and Cheers! Actually, I like my x86 processor, except I wish they were big-endian. Just a small thing.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Taiwan is a big chip maker. I wonder how much of this is an attempt to undermine one of Taiwan's important sources of economic strength. Also, this has a double bonus for imperialism in that making the world less dependent on Taiwan's chip production will make other countries less concerned about Taiwan's fate. A free trade agreement with Taiwan would sure be a big help for democracy and against modern day imperialism.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Wo you mai zhongua dianshi. Not even close to what I wanted to say: "I, for one, welcome our Chinese CPU overlords"
Great for the end consumer, however. Possibly even really really good for me as a United States citizen as Intel/AMD will be forced to drop prices to compete in the world market.
You missed a few basics in economics 101. Cost of production, Cost of development, Economy of scale.
The cost of R & D, FAB construction and operation is why these complex parts are dirt cheap now. Cutting production in half due to competition will not reduce prices. It runs up costs and slows R & D as each product must remain on the market longer.
AMD is screaming foul now because their yeild is about 1/2 that of Intel, so they are swearing that Intel is dumping on the market below manufacturing cost. For the same manufacturing cost, Intel is shipping about twice as many parts. They can sell below AMD's production cost and still sell at a profit because more of AMD chips can't ship.
Forcing lower prices the market simply stops production if you can't manufacture for that price. Ask AMD what this feels like.
Last time I checked their profit margin is -58.24%. They can't continue for long in the price war.
Link http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AMD
AMD can't lower prices without fixing yield, They will fold first.
Intel is operating at a profit and NOT dumping on the market to kill AMD.
Their profit margin is 17.79%
Link http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=INTC
Don't expect competition to cause either company to suddenly cut prices in half. It ain't gonna happen because it can't.
If the prices are lower, it is because the parts are cheaper with less performance to meet the lower prices the market will bear. Example Intel's Atom. Smaller, lower power, lower performance, lower cost. You won't be buying Core Extreme quad chips for Atom prices. It can't happen.
China has lower labor costs as well as lower FAB costs (less EPA costs) so even with a lower yield, they may be able to under price Intel/AMD. AMD can't enter a price war, they are already in the red. Intel can come down a little until the volume drops off, then the unit price will stall as the divide between red and black ink rises due to lower volume. The margins can be cut some, but as volume is cut, the red ink price line will rise as the cost per unit increases. Cross that line and jobs and FABs are cut. R & D is reduced. You get less for the buck.
Take finance 101 again and try again.
Intel pushes faster, better, cheaper. Without all three, someone else will take the market.
Let's face it, you can buy an Atom chip for less than the price of a good steak dinner for a family of 2. Guess which has much more R & D and manufacturing costs. Only through volume at high manufacturing yield is the prices this low. Cut volume or yield, and the price takes a hit.
The truth shall set you free!
Yes, that has been the way of things for many years, and is one of the major historical sources of US wealth... they trade their money for other countries goods, then the other country uses them as a world currency to trade for oil with a third party country.
Thing is, they're all bad cheques. It's like if I paid the butcher with a bad cheque and took his meat, then he paid the baker with my cheque, then he paid the candlestick maker with my cheque. The candlestick maker, he put it in his wall safe for a rainy day.
It's great for me, I get all my shit for free. And as long as no one tries to cash the cheques I write, no one notices that I'm ripping everyone off.
Iraq started breaking stride with the other oil producing nations and allowing Euros to be traded instead of US Dollars. Then they got invaded, and that put a stop to that.
I wonder if the US has the military capacity to stop a second nation from breaking stride? I don't think so, but we'll see.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Transmeta has tried, Godson has already tried, and both have yet to make a dent. It's just another knockoff that will not take off.
Like a lot of things from China, reliability will be suspect, not to mention any willful patent infringement.
Unlike either of those two, they don't have the backing of a government will over a billion people in it. If they only make a CPU that's an ARM clone to run their cell phones and something that is slightly more robust than a Barbie PC, then I'd call it success if they manage to rollout a few hundred million of them to the chinese public.
Intel will lose if they can't make hyper super cheap computers for China. I don't know if the chinese can do that, but they've got more incentive to do it than intel does. Intel can just play in their current market while these unknown cheap chinese folks come out of now where and it 10, 20, 30 years have e $1-5 chip that is just as fast as Intel's latest.
"If China were to collapse the U.S. economy which is something they could do right now "
How, exactly? I've heard this before, but never a proper explanation.
Sell all their US bonds? To whom?
Stop selling shit to us? That would suck, but I'm sure all the other Asian nations would be right on top of picking up the slack.
Another thing is that some of the scenarios would be so internally destructive that it reminds me of the Looney Tunes where Daffy, desperate to steal the show from Bugs, blows himself up. When Bugs compliments him, he says "Yeah, yeah - but I can only do it once" as he is floating up to heaven.
Sure, China *could* destroy the US economy, but at a cost of wiping themselves out. If the US collapses and stops buying Chinese goods, that would idle millions of factory workers, who are NOT going to want to go back to the farms from whence they came. hey weren't real happy when the Beijing factories were idled for 2 weeks for the Olympics - picture that anger, multiplied by it happening all over the country and for an indefinite time.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The U.S. is China's largest buyer. They wouldn't be where they are without all that money flowing that way. If China were to collapse the U.S. economy which is something they could do right now then they would lose a lot of business devastating their own economy
This is exactly why it is bad to build economies around debt. You get artificial restrictions in the economy that leads to problems (recessions) when you can't find someone willing to get endebted.
And when you actually find people people willing to get endebted the economy will roll on for a while until it reaches its limit and it again isn't possible to find people willing to get endebted.
Of course, the ones making the big money over time on this is bankers, investors and others that deal in debt. For the rest of society it is just another thing that causes instability and inefficency. Of course, coming up with a better system that works in practice isn't an easy task, and implementing it is even harder.
I thought that was Iran that allowed Euros to buy oil. Also that was after Iraq was invaded.
They don't get anything in exchange for the US currency. It means nothing.
I thought this is what they were using to buy up all the US companies?
Intel chips are I believe made in America, Ireland and Israel. AMD's I believe are mostly made in Germany.
For other sorts of chips, try Taiwan and South Korea. Both of those countries have economies that are very close to Western standards.
It's dangerous for the world to learn that you can make piles of money without freedom.
If you are worried about that then just look at the US. Considerable reductions in freedoms, particularly for us foreigners some of whom come to trade, at the same time as a major economic decline. That should persuade people otherwise.
>Iraq started breaking stride with the other oil producing nations and allowing Euros to be traded instead of US Dollars. Then they got invaded, and that put a stop to that.
That sounds bad for Iran since they did that too some months ago.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUSBLA02024820080430
Iran conducts all crude trade in euro, yen
Since the Arpanet/Internet was born?
No thats not true.
Although the design is Chinese, the Godson processors will be manufactured by STMicroelectronics, which is a French-Italian company.
The processors will probably be manufactured in Crolles, France on the ST 65nm process. The backend packaging is done in Singapore and Malaysia using RoHS compliant package design.
"by trading them in on the Foreign Exchange Market for Euro's (or an other currency) on a large scale, to manipulate the value of the Dollar."
Again, someone has to be willing to trade them Euros for the Dollars. Who would buy such huge sums of dollars to help tank the US economy and thereby hurt themselves? Remember, the US mortgage crisis caused FOREIGN banks to collapse.
And even if they did find buyers, one assumes they would be trying to depress the value of the dollar. Why would they? The dollar has been tanking already and the Chinese are feeling the pain in the form of less trade and higher prices for oil - do you think they would want MORE of that?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You know, I heard that precise same argument around 1970 ... only that time it was about Japan. "All they can do is copy.", "They can make anything out of used beer cans...but all they make is cheap shit".
How do you feel about Japan these days?
Which country is doing the most in robotics?
(P.S.: I'm not certain that the answer to the second question is Japan, but they're definitely one of the top three.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Whether that is a bad idea depends on the opportunity cost (and not in U.S. dollars). China gets a hell of a lot more out of trade than mere dollars.
The arabs trade oil for dollars, they're not interested in anything else, and therefore, if oil gets replaced (which will obviously happen), they're up on niagara falls without a paddle and with some ayatollahs and other muslim clergy having spent years mining the bottom of the falls.
China is building an internal economy, with tons upon tons of different stuff, that will provide them with options in the future.
The problem is that when you rely upon currency controls to make ones own products cheaper it tends to cause other problems. Such as minor moves in the value of the Yuan making huge impacts in employment and for the producers in nations to which the items are being sold getting angry at being cheated.
These "impacts" are only huge in absolute numbers, otherwise they're tiny. But yes 1000 people laid off is a lot. Compared to 900 million jobless (what would happen if the US divests from China), it's a spec of dust in the wind.
Actually the Israeli guessed the frequency of their radars (well, they measured it), then used a station based in Lebanon to send out a very powerfull pulse on that frequency.
"Hacking" certainly. Backdoor ? No. Just limits of the technology.
ARM is denser than x86, especially if you use Thumb. Anyway, nothing mainstream has a high-performance FPU these days, apart from x86.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
American money is like Air Miles.
Air miles that you can use to buy oil. Oil is still traded in dollars.
And while I'm sure many Euros are used to build factories in China, I'd bet that most factories are still bought with dollars.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Actually there's a thing that both CPU and OS fanboys fail to understand: it's the apps that matter, silly. The hardware and even OS are just a necessary evil to run that software.
The problem is having _software_ for it which doesn't suck, covers enough of the problem space, etc.
The Dragon CPU doesn't have an Intel-compatible ISA, so it doesn't automatically inherit all the Intel-only apps. It's based on the (unlicensed) Mips III ISA. The lack of a license is also why they don't advertise it as such.
But the cavalier attitude to IP is also what will bite them in the arse. When both are free as in, you can get them burned on a blank for (next to nothing), there isn't all that much reason to go with Linux ports instead of buying Windows and Office. Both do the same thing, but one of them has all the years of FUD behind it, and apparent incentives like "but everyone else uses Word and Excel, what if they send me something that doesn't work well in OOo?" or "but maybe if I learn to use Word, I can find a better job where they use that" or "but will I be able to play the latest pirated games on that?" (Even the "run them in Wine" doesn't exactly work on a non-intel architecture, because, as the recursive acronym goes, "Wine Is Not an Emulator.")
I've been saying it for a long time: piracy isn't some grand revenge against the big foreign corporations. Piracy only serves to kill the cheaper, but good enough, alternatives. If the choice were "do I buy AutoCAD for the equivalent of 6 years of Chinese average wage, or get a local alternative for 1% of that" (or even a F/OSS one) the choice might be very different than when both are free (as in stolen beer;) The big foreign corporation, regardless of what BSA tells you, hasn't actually lost anything there. That Chinese kid making some graphics for a mod wouldn't have paid thousands of dollars on AutoCAD, because he doesn't have those thousands of dollars anyway. But he might have been more interested in some alternatives which may have less features, but are cheap and local, or outright free. Piracy only serves to kill those possible alternatives.
And I'm not saying that as a personal rant against piracy, but because I believe that it's one reason why the Dragon will be stillborn no matter how good the silicon is. When the question comes, "but does this local Dragon computer run all that new pirated software?", the Dragon loses anyway.
And China has already had a similar experiment with their own DVD-alternative. Regardess of what other merits or disadvantages it may have, it just can't compete with something which plays all those thousands of pirated Hollywood DVDs. When you don't pay the DVD license "tax" anyway because you pirate those movies (or buy them from a counterfeiter which doesn't), the lack of those royalties on the local brewed codec becomes irrelevant.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes. They're being included in low-end computers, set-top boxes, and supercomputers, all over China. Such as the Tianhua GX-1C.
The Dragon chips (and variations of) are also gaining some traction in Europe and the US, being used in a couple dirt-cheap $250 EEE PC clones. eg.: http://www.compsource.com/pn/3KRZ40074GB/3k_Computers_2340/
http://www.gdium.com/description/
They've made millions of them.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm not worried, and my country is a lot closer to China than the US or Europe. In fact, I think many Asians welcome a strong China which will allow us to play China against the US to curry favours, just like we did during the Cold War. See here, the way I see it, there is no difference in principle between so-called democratic capitalist governments and communist governments. The only difference is the method of choice that they use to screw you. Unlike China, the US has developed far enough to no longer needing to use a bullet to the back of the head (Guantanamo aside) to keep the populace in line but instead uses an arguably far more devastating method: litigation and obtuse laws. To a citizen of a capitalistic society, there is nothing more deadly than being sued to bankruptcy. Also, I wonder who was the first person to come up with this theory of capitalism = democracy? This is utter crock. Throughout history, capitalistic societies are sometimes the worst there is. The Roman Empire is probably the ultimate example of this, fueling its economy by invading, pillaging and enslaving everyone. It is no surprise then that China is turning out not as a clone of the US.
As a brit I would much rather the US had the ability to spy on us through such backdoors than the chineese had that ability.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
They are not holding it down using reserves, they have semi-pinned it to the US dollar. It does not float freely against our currency, it is a managed float.
If they did that it would shoot up drastically, devaluing the dollars they hold and making Chinese goods much more expensive here.
That would injury both parties.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Has it never occurred to you that that may be a price they are willing to pay?
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
So as a quick answer to your question, no TSMC does not manufacture anything in North America. They do most everything in XinZhu Science Park in the center of Taiwan.
As to the Godson. This was an intriguing story about eight years ago but at this point it's quite literally academic. The project is maintained as a pet research project to encourage students to learn processor design, but it is in no way a threat to Intel or AMD or Nvidia or Via or even any of the dozens if not hundreds of ARM 11 microprocessor vendors. The reason this is so is simple --money.
Processor intellectual property has been almost completely worthless for years now. Look at the netbook phenomena with Intel's Atom platform and the rise of the ARM 11 systems with Ghz clock speeds and insanely frugal power consumption that go into smart phones and media players as well as netbooks. These are devices that are going to be mass-market retailed in the low hundreds of dollars and quickly heading for sub one hundred dollar territory. It's a race to the bottom. There's not much room for processor technology to pay off at those price points after you pay for the LCD, the Li+ battery, the wireless radios, the chip fabrication and assembly. It doesn't matter if it's China, Russia, Venezuela, India, Canada or France. Developing a new CPU design at this point is first and foremost an exercise in bragging rights that will threaten none of the existing players who basically give up the circuit designs for a few pennies per unit.