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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.
Always open backdoors work both ways... once discovered.
Are there 2 billion consumers in the marketplace who will purchase goods and services related to that arch?
Alternatively: Does a bear shit in the woods?
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.
Yup, because they can't risk having the Big Bad US Government overthrow the People's Republic. The Chinese people would never (dare) resist or oppose their benevolent, self-sacrificing government.
Also, do you know of any specific backdoors, or are you just assuming that security holes are deliberate backdoors?
China has approximately 400 million people in its middle class, and growing.
Yes, people will develop applications for it.
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.
Someone, somewhere, somehow will offer a sufficient bribe to gain access to those backdoors.
Sounds like a great idea China, go for it!
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Their Loongson 3 MIPS-clone already has x86 hardware-emulation built into the silicon.
A review of UPU
I hear they're hiring Notch to develop the new CPU architecture.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
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
Politics (and spying) aside, this is probably not unlike their past effort to create a new Audio Video compression Standard. I'm sure the Chinese look at the Arm ISA situation and see wow, you really do have to get an Arm license if you want to make a smart phone. This seems similar to the BluRay MPEG/H.264 situation and their move with AVS. They've got a lot of smart folks in China and want to spur development. In the process, the want to see if they can give their local companies an economic advantage (reduced licensing fees for manufactured products for domestic consumption).
If this takes off in China (a big market), then instead of chinese companies paying foreign companies a licensing fee for products (net outflow of money), the foreign companies that want to make a product for consumption in the chinese market will probably have to pay the Chinese licensing fees for this. That way money for new development gets to stay in China benefiting their economy more than others. Why wouldn't they want to do this?
Of course if it makes it easier to spy on folks, so much the better (homogenous platforms make that easier), but I don't think that's the main motivation. As with most things in China today, the motivation is national economic self-interest.
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 are you talking about? There are literally dozens (maybe hundreds) of different types of screws alone, engineered vastly different from one another to be best at their application. Wood screws are much different from sheet metal screws which are much different from concrete screws, phillips-head versus flat-head versus torx versus proprietary heads...
Everything from the length of the screw, the spacing of the threading, whether it's self-tapping or not...they're all engineered to be best at a particular application. Once you extend the set to include fasteners of any type, there are probably a million different types, be it mechanical, chemical, magnetic...
Try drilling a flat-head sheet metal screw into concrete. That's pretty much the same result you'll have trying to shove a one-size-fits-all CPU into every embedded computer system in the nation.
... 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?
Each time I go to China, I'm amazed at the criticism and vitriol hurled at the government and communism. During conversations in public places. Makes me uncomfortable (kind of like visiting a friend's house and seeing a family fight). I've heard worse about the US government, but one set of jokes stand out. Seems that some Chinese are now joking that they'd welcome a US military invasion. From their tone, I can tell they are joking and just using hyperbole to show their frustration. Maybe they joke that way because they really don't dare oppose their government, but would be happy if someone else did. But I can't help but think WTF!
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.
They probably just want to have an R2 cache instead of an L2 cache.
Just so you know, Chinese actually has a separate R and L sound in their language (although the 'R' is halfway between the French R and the English R). Japanese unifies that phoneme, not Chinese.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."