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China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture
MrSeb writes "According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China's reliance on western intellectual property. There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture. What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
This is probably among the worst ideas I've ever heard. They're basically saying "Standardize at the cost of having different architectures that are superior in their own ways", which is just absurd.
will people go out of their way to develop applications for this arch assuming they are already using x86_64/ARM/SPARC/etc ?
Always open backdoors work both ways... once discovered.
Then you will very quickly see the exact same monitoring schemes pop up in Western designs.
Will this be their own actual proprietary design, or are they just going to steal (like they usually do) some American company's design and sell it as their own? I predict there to be a scratched-off Intel logo at the bottom right corner of their schematics.
sudo make me a sandwich
If certain people are to be believed, we are all living on government money even here in the USA. Some people and corporations receive explicit money from the government (welfare, subsidies, bail-outs) — that's easy, but they are still a minority (despite the government's best efforts to expand the "assistance" programs). But even those, who do not receive foodstamps, can still be considered being government sponsored, because the government is not taxing them as much as they could've been...
For example: "Oil companies got tax-breaks and therefore must do ...." Or: "The rich got their taxes lowered, and so they must do ...."
"What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
Then they will have yet again copied the West's products and then rebranded the designs for their own use. As they have been doing for some time now..... China knows for a fact that the US is using backdoors in technology for warfare (see: Iran) and to overthrow governments (see: Arab Spring) - and is not going to long term put itself at risk by using these American technologies that invite 'revolutions of the people' (see: coups).
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Because other country's spy agencies could crack the backdoor, and then see what all these government contract agencies and companies are doing.
What do you mean "if China ... makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?" I would expect that is their true motivation here. Any other reasons given are part of the cover.
Or a NSA-CIA-MI5-KGB backdoor-free architecture...
Didn't they try this like a decade ago with knock-off 586 chips?
"always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies"
Our spooks would probably love that. It wouldn't stay Chinese-only for very long.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Considering the widespread stealing from the chinese government on western high tech company I just wonder how much of this is "do-it-yourself" and how much is "copying other IP and customize it for your own". I mean, software has been hacked in a similar fashion, why not hardware design?
...thousands of hackers have boners right now
Yeah and in the end it will just be a copy of a copy of something. In all seriousness, it would be interesting if they created something new but to mature that technology will takes years, possibily decades.... and by that time everything else would have already advance... China you're so backwards sometimes!
Seriously. This is architecture stuff. You can't just write a backdoor into a chip that easily. You can't write censorship in, because there would be no way to update the censorlist. The most you could do is provide a code injection backdoor (If you see byte sequence xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, jump to the following byte), but with no way to disable it they would just weaken their own defence when it inevitably leaked.
I'm not so sure I'd be all that concerned.
I recall back in the 80's how the DoD was mandating all programming be done in 'Ada'.
How'd that work out?
What if China makes its own ... microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?
Groan. More of the endless paranoia stoking and misdirection.
If that were to be so, they might have beaten the US or Britain or Israel or Iran or Mars to the punch.
People need to wake the hell up and stop swallowing the latest misdirection efforts.
The "Enter Name of Latest Enemy to Fear Monger Over" are not the sole enemies of "freedom".
They are just the hand the magicians want you to watch.
Trust no-one, especially those who stand to gain financially.
It is very curious to see the every foray by Chinese government become self-reliant on technology being portrayed as their desire for more surveillance. But if you look historically, China has actually been moving toward more openness while US and other Western countries are becoming more and more closed societies. Also after the passing of CISPA in the US House of Representatives recently, it can not even be argued that US government does not wish it had the kind of surveillance this article is suggesting.
Also please take look at IxMaps to see how the Internet traffic is being monitored by intelligence agencies.
last time someone tried to make a cpu compatible with ARM they were squashed with patents bought and killed, but of course they were a small company
I hear they're hiring Notch to develop the new CPU architecture.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The article last two paragraphs are only political propaganga and does not add any technical information.
who wrote that? an american political "komisariat"?
And also: really you are sure now your's processors are free of all state vigilance?
I have a concern about this entirely unrelated to questions of censorship, spying, industrial espionage and the like. Somebody please enlighten me if I am wrong.
If China develops its own general-purpose ISA and manages to put any serious market share behind it, it could eventually make its way to non-Chinese markets. If this happens, it seems likely that it will significantly undercut Intel/AMD prices possibly at comparable performance levels initially. The pattern exists in virtually ever other sector wherein Chinese input to a market undercuts and eventually eliminates competition based on price alone and despite other virtues of the product. The competitors eventually wither because they cannot manufacture the product at a cost acceptable to the price-fixated consumer.
Now when I can no longer buy a decent shower caddy because the *only* ones that are sold outside extremely highly priced specialty shops are made with substandard parts and labor from China, that's too bad. I'm stuck buying a new one every year or so after the last one breaks. It's a whole different world with CPUs and ISAs. Say what you like about the level of competition in the United States: CPU progress marches onward each year, new foundries are built, technologies shrink, transistor counts go up, and work per clock cycle increases. If comparable early Chinese entries undercut their American competition and that competition dies, it seems very unlikely to me that price-conscientious Chinese firms will be as concerned about continuing the pace of innovation. Progress in the CPU sector could come to a jarring, extremely unfortunate, hard-to-reverse halt.
Thoughts?
This is brilliant! China should absolutely pursue this line of thinking in all area. I am projecting a strong recovery in the US labor market....
Back when we had all sorts of different screws and nuts and bolts with no standardization,
there was always some reason why one particular brand was superior in one way.
But if they never standardized, we would likely now be paying $5/screw
instead of 5 cents/screw.
This seems to be total overkill. If China wants to spy on its users, its a lot easier to do it differently.
Why not simply enforce that all new machines have UEFI and only accept to boot an OS which is signed by the Chinese government? In the kernel they can then introduce whatever spying technology they want.
This is pretty much equivalent to creating their own architecture, since that would also require a specially compiled OS for that architecture.
Or am I missing something?
ISA was created in 1981. China is just ensuring that everything from the past 30 years happens again...
What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?
We will still buy those products because they are the cheapest.
"makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring"
This is one of the silliest things I've ever read on /. It shows that the author has no idea of what an ISA is.
becuse the alphabet or whatever they call it has like 60000 letters. how else to cram all those letters in a dye but make it bigger? what of numbers? do they have 1000 times more numbers too? and punchashun? who can fit a key board on his desk with 60000 letters? how fast can the fast sinaese type?
You could put one into an implementation of the ISA.
If you wanted to put a backdoor into an implementation, you could easily do so with x86-64. It has instructions specifically used for AES. Just wire those to record keys, substitute keys or not actually encrypt and you're off and running.
Of course, since any ISA and implementation is Turing-complete without the specialized crypto instructions, you could just use the non-specialized instructions to do your work and then it would be a lot harder for the chip to save off your keys or data.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
So much for their move towards free markets and growing economy. Let's hope this doesn't catch on in the communist United States as well. Intel will probably be lobbying congress to make their competitor's cpus illegal
Recommended reading: The Road to Serfdom
To build on MTTs's argument - but how would this work in practice? I am seeing a huge logical hole that I can’t figure out. Picking a ISA would seem to work against them. Does anybody have any ideas?
This is how I understand the proposal. The Government (and I can use upper case here because China is lead by a “Communist” party that leads state-owned enterprises – slightly more monolithic then elsewhere.) wants to save money (i.e. not pay western firms) by endorsing a ISA. O.K. I am not exactly a supporter of big government, so I don’t like the actor, but I do approve of AMD reverse engineering Intel’s x86 architecture.
Obviously this is to boost technical skills in chip design. Many people have suggested that this would make it easier to install back doors.
But the ISA would have to be published. WTO says it must. China can tilt the playing field to domestic companies – but only so far.
So, how would a backdoor that was openly documented work? I mean us slashdoters laugh all the time on “Security via obscurity”. How would a security hole via openness work?
Interesting how most comments wank on about fears of backdoors.
How stupid do you think the chinese are? A hardware backdoor in every device means that if you lose control of it even once, your entire infrastructure belongs to whoever you lost it to. I don't think anyone would take that risk for a bit of spying, not if you already have 100 better ways of spying.
What is so unlikely about the assumption that it really is in order to become independent of the west? That's a biggy right there. There's an elephant in the room, you know? The chinese are fast becoming one of the most important players on the world stage and they can't have something as important as chip design rest with a country (USA) that might turn hostile at the next unpredictable election.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Will all CPU instruction be given the same time allowance, or will it be a case of to each according to its need?
"What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
As opposed to the USA same? At this point in time I'm really not sure if I can trust USA any more than China. As a government I probably would be even more skeptical.
It just might be that they want an own foundation to build on - that everything would be based on the same architecture is probably because governments in general are not known for their technical knowledge.
The /. article seems somewhat biased.
They probably just want to have an R2 cache instead of an L2 cache.
... a unified architecture could make it easier to build in a common backdoor for spying ...
I doubt its over surveillance, such a backdoor will be found. The real motivation is most likely economic, simply not wanting to buy an expensive part from the west. It may even become a part they could export. Do consumers really care, or even know, what CPU is inside some electronic appliance/device?
China has already demonstrated their standards for software success with this ever popular distribution.
The platform must conform!
I don't think it is a question of a good or bad idea. As the summary surmises, a unified architecture could make it easier to build in a common backdoor for spying. This is an issue of making surveillance easier and this should hardly come as a surprise because a Communist country is entirely dependent upon controlling its citizens through the use of surveillance. Ultimately, by putting in place a mandate and enforcing it, it places additional costs and burdens on the businesses that must abide by these new regulations.
Could also be that they are so paranoid that the West has backdoors into the existing technology that they want to design their own.
MMIX
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
It seems like the patents should run out quite soon on most of the core x86 stuff. And AMD were willing to license x64 to Transmeta and Via (Via already have an x86 license from Intel). So maybe x86 will become an open architecture that anyone can implement if they pay up some fees, a bit like MIPS.
It's worth pointing out that China has an unlicensed MIPS clone called Longson - basically they skipped the patented instructions. Unlike Lexra, they made them NOPS - Lexra made them fault and MIPS sued them on the grounds that it was possible to emulate them in software.
Despite all that I've read that by partnering with MIPS licensees it would theoretically be possible to sell Longsons in the US. Of course the problem is that MIPS is a bit outdated and is not really competitive with x86 for performance heavy stuff or for ARM for low power. And obviously ARM is very open - it is even possible to get a license that lets you build ARMS with custom micro architecture like Qualcomm do.
So it does make you wonder if at some point x64 will become similarly open. x64 chips tend to lead performance per core so there's a certain argument for this.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If only to give x86 a swift kick in the bits. These days, the x86 standard serves primarily as a barrier to entry - anyone can pick up open-source tools and write sort-of shippable code, but to get the last factor of two in performance, you either have to be Intel, or buy Intel's compiler and know a lot about configuring it and your code to mesh right.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"...or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
Then the U.S. Government will surely follow suit because of you know all the children and terrorists...not because political rivals and corporate interests could be protected....
Didn't we ( USA ) ourselves standardized on Intel x86 architecture?? Don't we call Intel x86 chips industry-standard???
given that they still build physical product (so beneath us Americans now) and virtually all of it to boot, they are a tail more than big enough to wag the entire dog.
"The primary reason for this move is to lessen China's reliance on western intellectual property."
As if these chips won't be chock full of western IP... They've gotten what they wanted from the West, now they cut the cord. Rinse and repeat.
..and all I saw was Chinese "backdoors". It was quite spectacular!
How did a technology standardization story turned into a rant fest for all the sinophobes?
If this were a story about Germany or Japan it would actually stay on the technical topic.
Oh I'm sorry, I forgot China is doing well AND isn't under the thumbs of crumbling Western wannabe imperialists regimes.
> or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?
I'd like to point out that an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies would very shortly after release be an always-open backdoor into this technology for absolutely everyone. I don't see them doing this, but if they did, it'd be entertaining.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
How stupid do you think the chinese are? A hardware backdoor in every device means that if you lose control of it even once, your entire infrastructure belongs to whoever you lost it to. I don't think anyone would take that risk for a bit of spying, not if you already have 100 better ways of spying.
The fearmongering is a valid point. However, the rest of your sentence is nonsense. People who make political decisions are rarely connected to the realities of their policies. Why do you think Stephen Conray wants to protect children be censoring the internet? The Australian PM admitted that it is a moral decision and not a technical one. Think about that for a moment, and then translate to China -- a place where 20 million people starved to death in the late 60s, because Mao wanted to increase steel production, and people melted their farming tools.
The world is irrational. Don't expect someone to hold back on "great idea" because it has the potential to backfire.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Yes it seems likely that the Chinese will put a backdoor into their chip. Which is bad. But is it worse than backdoors in say, Intel or AMD motherboards or chips... probably not. With the chinese CPU backdoor plan eventually a Linux will be released that fixes the problem, with American chips/motherboards/OSs it will probably take a lot longer and be more difficult to identify the backdoors/security holes. Also since they are driven by capitalism not communism many more backdoors and "bugs" will be accepted as non-intentional... also reducing how vehemently security researchers will search for and remove backdoors.
schtick a little bit guys...how is this any different than government contracts to intel or amd? just replace the word government mandate with corporate contract, as most of our government is a revolving door of corporate namesakes anyhow.
take note that the f35 lightning contains 3 powerpc chips. DoD and other government projects have certain architecture and even (gasp) operating system requirtements here in the states, often mandated or enforced by legislature.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Its a GREAT IDEA! Wait... Ummm RTFA.... wait.... wait... No. No. Nope. Terrible implementation.
Worthless sh*t.
It's been shown that you can add backdoors to CPUs with very few transistors. With a few hundred gates (on a die containing hundreds of millions of gates!) you can create a REMOTELY EXPLOITABLE BUG that lets you escalate from user-mode code to ring 0. Just passing data through the cache can trigger it. So you could create a remote webpage, that when browsed to, causes certain data to pass through the CPU's cache and "activates" the backdoor, disabling some memory protection and allowing a simple conventional attack to completely take over the machine. Or you could just send it a specially-crafted IP packet. Make it look like http on port 80 or something, to get it past hardware firewalls. The network driver will load the packet into the CPU's cache, and then higher layers in the network stack will ignore it because it doesn't have proper sequence number or whatever. You could remotely and silently trigger the exploit whenever you want.
Its actually a big problem that most of our chips are fabbed in other countries and we have no way to check them to see if they contain these type of backdoors.
MIPS, ARM, POWER and Alpha - ARM is not likely to be released, since it's so lucrative, and I doubt that IBM will want to give up the POWER architecture either. MIPS might - and there, there is the Loongson processor, so the Chinese would already have a head start. Alpha is definitely a possibility, which I had suggested that the Russians use if they wanted a completely home grown super-computer. But if the Chinese want something proprietary, their best choice would be to tap Intel and go w/ the Itanium, which would be truly secret since few have bothered to study it due to its being such a boondoggle. But if it went to China, it would gain the economics of scale.
If the Chinese do the UPU CPU, and want to make it different from all the rest, suggestion - make it a VLIW, and have an entire committee of PhDs working on the ultimate compilers for these, and similarly, have CPU designers working on it. Make it the first 128-bit CPU ever, and have different implementations of it be the basis for everything from supercomputers to tablets. That way, they make it next to impossible for other software (read: dissidents who might want to get subversive software on to that platform) to be ported to it, while the only party authorized software can be created and compiled for such platforms.
Go w/ VLIW, comrades - you'll be amazed at how dependent everyone who wants to do anything on that computer would be on you.
First they start restricting exports of rare earths and vespene gas... pissing away their monopoly.
Now they seek to mandate architecture rather than let market decide. These systems only work as well as they do and are only affordable as they are due to economies of scale. If you artificially throw a wrench in that the most likely outcome is increased cost and lower quality.
Unfounded american paranoia wrt chinese products and firms including huawei and lenovo is equally stupid.
Win!
~Sticky
China already has a backdoor into all of us.
They started by stripping out the rightward shift and rotate instructions from the instruction set.
DEC - Digital Equipment of China.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?
Can you say "windfall for US Intelligence" ??
The Chinese-Communists would have to be really, really stupid to put a hardware back-door into their microprocessors. Such a hole is inevitable to be discovered and exploited by western intelligence, whether the means are covertly stealing the information or reverse-engineering. It practically guarantees that they could never trust any system with one of these chips in it. And it gets better -- even if the systems that those chips are in aren't themselves "sensitive", if they connect in any way to systems that are sensitive, they could be used as a means to compromise the sensitive systems.
You're talking about an oppressive regime that manages to keep 1.3 billion people happy enough to not revolt. You're talking about a regime that has managed to keep a $300b / year trade deficit in their favour with the United States for the past 15 years (which, admittedly, says more about us than them). You're talking about a country with one of the largest militaries on the planet, and one of the fastest growing economies on the planet. We may not like them very much, but they sure don't seem to be fsck-ups enough to make that kind of mistake.
... Now, the possibility of them installing a hardware backdoor into products that they only sell to the West? That's an entirely different matter. But there is no way they'd want to use those same systems in their own infrastructure. And that's what this new "national" microchip is about -- a common ISA for their own internal use, to remove reliance on foreigners (that would be us).
/dev/random
This is what the US federal government should have done instead of pushing idiotic "cybersecurity" legislation like CISPA. Make all government, DoD, DoE, contractor machines run on a different ISA and chipset. Not that the ISA would be a secret from any foreign governments, or anyone else, just that malware would have to be specially written to target it, and existing and new malware targeted at commercial and home users wouldn't run on it.
What, they might actually invent their own for a change? Unless "lessen" is a synonym for totally abandon (and stop copying). Like that's going to happen anytime, real soon!
of communist mentality: we produce only one size but it fits everyone!
Let me point out that they have the great firewall of China. And one thing that has been learned is that it is designed to work both ways nicely. Even if they leave backdoors in their equipment (most likely that will be the case), there will not be easy ways to get the information out of China. IOW, when China finally attacks the west, they already have their firewall up and most likely will have quickly installed updates on all of their core equipment. IOW, they will not be able to monitor, but nobody will attack either.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is nothing more than a way to embezzle money to their friends' companies. As we all know everyone is running Red Flag Linux in China? hahaha
I'm delighted to hear this actually .. if the Chinese leadership is terminating whatever understanding they may have with the anglo-israeli agenda 21 sustainable dictatorship crowd, so much better for the rest of us little people who have to live on this planet. I would think this may be a definite possibility, you see these "leaders" on both sides .. they know no loyalty, no friendship and their allegiances are enforced with naked brutality. Their superiors mistreat them cruelly, for they have to constantly fear those under them to rise up. People like George Soros or any of the Rockefellers would rip each other's throats out at the drop of a hat if they thought they could profit from such a move. You see, the higher you rise on the pyramid, no matter what side of it, the more you have earned your progress through ruthlessness and deceit... and looking at a pyramid the higher you get the less room there is to stand in.
So yes delightful news indeed if there were a real conflict with China. This would occupy our local parasites quiet a bit forcing them to back off from their agenda of dismantling the west (where is your job going next?) and undermining our personal freedoms (hey did you know you can't even buy raw milk in the US anymore, incredible as it may sound)..
Bring it on China and in that case xiexie '', thank you :-)
From what I've read, some MIPS CPUs, such as the XBurst, are pretty competitive w/ ARM on both performance and power consumption. So it wouldn't be such a bad option. However, if the Chinese want something that they completely control, they could go for a home grown VLIW processor, which would make it easier on the transistors, since most of the work would be done by a compiler, and then they could have a wide variety of implementations covering anything from tablets to super-computers.
Step 1. Close the Leet Javascript serverside apps page you were reading. ...
Step 2. Wait for the Mark 1 computer to reload it's pipelines. Does it seem like it's working well now? Great! Go on to step 3.
Step 3. Open Wikipedia. Pick a processor architecture. Intel x86, x64, MIPS, ARM, SPARC, PPC,
Step 4. Read the page. Notice in many cases different companies make chips that are the same Architecture. Notice how many different IMPLEMENTATIONS of those architectures exist. Are they all the same? No. Just like javascript interpreters there are differences.
Step 5. Only attempt if your Mark 1 computer is working properly: Investigate timing attacks against microprocessors. Hint look at multicore cache information leakage.
Step 6. Only for the polymaths! Now consider, if you wrote some code that managed to determine what code was running in another core due to a shared cache and timing analysis, would that work on all implementations. Hint notice that some implementations don't share caches.
Step 7. Give up. Context switch back to Javascript. Boy writing server side apps in Javascript is a GREAT IDEA. and Hey a new idea pops to mind - javascript is AWESOME - why not use it for the code in pacemakers, or autopilots, or antilock brakes! Wait! Maybe that new architecture is really a way to make a new vulnerability in javascript! Oh wow! Better post that now before someone else beats you to it!
but they are still Leninist.
They're an aggressive Leninist-Capitalist state. Capitalism's money and Lenin's morals.
Will most likely end up being a direct ripoff from the western tech the seems to hate so much yet keep on copying without a care in the world. Copies which will probably end up exploding anyway, like everything else in China.
One advantage of the standardization idea is that development would be more stable over the long term, rather than having people compete every day against all other comers, they could develop toward one platform at a time, and do theoretical R & D toward the next gen cooperatively. The speed of advancing computer technology used to be quite important at increasing efficiencies in the work environment, but now that we are not waiting for our computers to boot and reboot every time we plug in a bit of information from hardware, the work efficiency increases aren't so much. Development of software and hardware could benefit greatly from a plan to stick with one architecture for some fixed period of time. The resources saved could be banked or used toward making the next release (every 4 years?) or architecture standard ready for use with more intelligent and effective testing before implementation. The backdoor/hacking/security issue can then be addressed in a more stable fashion (keyed interfacing that doesn't allow hardware/software to connect without a matching code/chip. If the result is an architecture that is stable and gets the work done, then we can drop a lot of the wasted competition redundancies and failed business startups which tie themselves to nonstandard equipment/software. Standardization has pros and cons, depending on how deep the standardization needs to go and at what cost in overall work effectiveness.
VLIW seems like a dead end to me. Intel - who really can afford to do R&D - spent a lot of time and money on Itanium and it seems like it's not really competitive with x64 even if you're willing to recompile your code for each micro architecture iteration.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Oh, it's definitely unsuitable for commercial purposes, where market acceptance would be an issue. But here, the goal is that Beijing would get something they'd completely control. Going w/ VLIW, they get to design a closed architecture that only approved software writers could get in in that one would have to have a minimal level of expertise in compiler design and writing programs for VLIW. They could resolve a part of the issue by making it partly EPIC and minimizing the re-compilation required b/w generations, but by making something like this, they'd have a really high barrier to entry.
While VLIW has its commercial disadvantages, its advantage is that since most of the activities like scheduling, branch prediction and so on take place in the compiler but not the silicon, the Chinese can make a wide variety of microprocessors - low powered ones for tablets to high performance ones in super-computers. They can then have Red Flag Linux, or whatever other home grown OS they have flying over them. As far as R&D goes, they could do Intel & HP a favor by buying up all rights to Itanium, so that they don't have to start from scratch, and then do whatever further R&D they want from there. Start initially by buying CPUs from Intel, but later commoditize it in China, and bring the economy of scale to it.
Once that's done, in all OSs that are approved for it, insert whatever back doors they wish. Those who wish to get around that would either have to get HP/UX (which too can be bought by the Chinese) or get Debian or FreeBSD. Maybe in the firmware, they can build in something to intercept those OSs unless they incorporate their backdoors.