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US Blocks Intel From Selling Xeon Chips To Chinese Supercomputer Projects
itwbennett writes: U.S. government agencies have stopped Intel from selling microprocessors for China's supercomputers, apparently reflecting concern about their use in nuclear tests. In February, four supercomputing institutions in China were placed on a U.S. government list that effectively bans them from receiving certain U.S. exports. The institutions were involved in building Tianhe-2 and Tianhe-1A, both of which have allegedly been used for 'nuclear explosive activities,' according to a notice (PDF) posted by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Intel has been selling its Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputers for years, so the ban represents a blow to its business.
"Intel has been selling its Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputers for years, so the ban represents a..." pile of knee jerk ridiculous bullshit?
just buy amd or clone them from the factory in china
So China is somehow incapable of buying the chips through a 3rd party? Maybe we could sell the Department of Commerce to China...nice regulatory agency, cheap, bit of wear around the edges and maybe a bit dated but it would fit well within China's Stupidity Index for Chinese What are Involved in Security against...errr...for the People.
If (yeah, I know) the Chinese are developing nuclear bombs, this will hold them up for maybe a couple of years.
In the meantime, they'll pull servers off of the Lenovo line, make a Beowulf cluster or something and then they have their super computer.
See Congress, in their blindness and firm belief in America's technological superiority, cannot see beyond what the lobbyists tell them. They are all lawyers - well mostly. And, sorry, an MD does NOT mean you are an expert about science or technology.
This conceit among our policy makers is going to lead us to ruin!
Someday soon, the US will be unable to bully people into this kind of bullshit. Soon enough, it will make more sense economically to say "Fuck US" and pull out. This can't happen soon enough.
Means milky way - literally Sky river
There should be a whooshing sound with this story, to signify the Chinese computer chip industry taking off.
Last I checked, Intel had a fabrication plant and an assembly plant in China. Perhaps they don't actually assemble or fabricate Xeons there, but way to not think things all the way through there Intel.
In other news, AMD stock goes through the roof.
Place something witty here
Since IBM is basically giving away POWER HPC chips and designs to China in exchange for market entry, this will only serve to accelerate their transition to CPU independence from US.
I wouldn't be surprised if the end result of this is ARM seeing a lot more development in the compute cluster environment.
i use flaws in the chips to inject viruses into my users computers. i depend on this.
Use my services at SEOChat.com and ChatButton.com so i can install viruses on your users computers!
Intel and Cray win $200m contract to build 180-petaflops supercomputer for US government.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/intel-cray-win-200m-contract-build-180-petaflop-supercomputer-us-government-1495755
I dont think so man.
Poor US Tech companies, for one side the Chinese government wants to oust them from China and in the other side their government making it impossible to for them to sell in China. That is what i call fire for all sides.
"US: No more supercomputer simulations for you!"
"China: Okay, we'll just go back to actual above-ground nuclear testing"
"US: But you signed a test ban!"
"China: Come and stop us."
This seriously cannot end well. China already has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, this goes so far beyond the scale of our pissing contest with Iran as to make it almost laughable (if it didn't potentially involve the world ending in a nuclear holocaust).
So, what stuff does Apple have made in China which the Chinese could just start knocking off to replace the Intel stuff?
This is like refusing to export snow to the Arctic. :-P
Hell, the Intel stuff is probably made somewhere in Asia, who can then just make the sale and tell the state department to piss off.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Intel moves their HQ out of the US and continues to operate as usual.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
The UK recently cleared a major chinese company from being a threat to national security while the U.S. still classifies them as such
In 2012, a U.S. congressional committee said that Chinese tech firms Huawei and ZTE were a national security threat because of their alleged ties to the Chinese government.
I wonder how many of those politicians have a problem with climate change models on super computers.
Really? If they do then what's their problem with China modeling nuclear blasts
At least throughout history, this is what happened. Eg, Zeiss and refusal to sell to the Japanese and the restrictions on Germany after WWI that played a large part in the development of the v2.
The pebcak's who made the ruling obviously don't understand how the Tianhe works.
The largest part, lions-share, of the compute power doesn't come from Intel's silicon. It comes from NVidia GPGPU's. All this does is move China to a different server controller (Global Foundries- owner of IBM silicon and server for AMD, ARM - which could license to TSMC, Samsung, or mainland mini-foundreids).
This makes me wonder which politician has the most stock in ARM and is looking for some profit. This crap is always about money and never actually about national security or they would get benchmark attribution correct.
I hate the plutocrats in charge.
How are you going to cut off access to something that is legally purchasable domestically?
What's going to stop a customer from just turning around and selling it to Beijing?
Just seems like a lot of tax dollars thrown into the fireplace.
Its very depressing that the democratic process can fail badly enough to not only put but keep clearly incompetent judges and politicians in complete control of legislating on stuff like this that they clearly don't understand.
There needs to be an active mechanism in government that weeds incompetence and ignorance out of the system.
Me american, me play joke
me take bit at end of double float and set it randomly whenever you divide
good luck trying to figure out of your nukes will go off!
It rhymes better in Mandarin, I swear
So, China and others have to resort to testing. I guess that's one way for the US to undermine the UN conventions to gain access to validation cycles for the next generation of weapons. Genius!
Have gnu, will travel.
I think all of the chips I've bought from Intel have been made in Malaysia or China. This is probably one of those, hey the chips are fabricated in China. But don't you dare sell the units to them. So China just operates a midnight shift, presses their own, and America loses out on revenue.
AMD? They want CPUs that actually deliver performance without causing a brownout from the power draw.
Nothing on the magnitude of North Korea or Iran. Not even on the same order as Russia. But it's clear that China is not in the global market for altrustic purposes. They're an economic superpower, and they're going defend that. They're unlike to attack the US, though. But mostly beause they sell most of their products to us, not for any other reason. If I were in the Chinese government, I'd be scared of North Korea and want to maintain a defense.
So the US DoD and DoC have to weigh the slight risk of China deciding some day to come in and take over the US against the more immediate benefits of China drawing NK's attention away from us and being part of the general defense against NK's batshit craziness.
The logic seems to be, "we got to do something", "this is stupid", "stupid or not it is something that can be done" "so let us do the stupid thing"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
No doubt this will slow China's progress. I mean, how else can they progress without a direct sale of Intel's Xeon chips?!
They probably already have 500 million stickers for the Intel Xion microprocessor they make at home. Sure it may have a tenth of the performance but it costs a fiftieth of the price to make.
Intel just received a flood of orders from China. Thousands of people have each ordered one Xeon processor each.
The Central Committee sighs, hacks Intel, steals entirety of IP over lunch hour.
They'll use $20 bills instead. Multicore processors with networking interfaces are in your phone, manufactured in South Korea and .... (wait for it) China! Okay, so it might take a bit more of them to get the same processing power, or it might take the Chinese longer to run their simulation, but they ain't stoppin' nobody.
This is how Wipro got started, by building PDP-11 clones because of export bans. The Soviets also got around export restrictions as well. It's never helped prohibit a adversary from getting what they want even when they have to build it themselves and at great cost.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
That would require a fab in china with Intel's process & capabilities. So far that doesn't exist in China (or Korea).
The Chinese fab is a 65nm fab, which is for older stuff. All their 22nm fabs are in the US and Israel.
That would require a fab in china with Intel's process & capabilities. So far that doesn't exist in China.
But this ensures that it will happen sooner than it otherwise would. America will have regulated yet another industry out of existence. A decade from now, we will look back, and consider this to be just as stupid and counter-productive as the cryptography ban of the 1990s.
Methinks that when writing code to simulate nukes, one would be inclined to avoid floats--or at the very least, stick to numerically stable algorithms. If division and multiplication suddenly starts acting weird, you know something's up. If you hid it in the addition and subtraction, they might never notice.
Everybody seems to be saying: "Oh noes, this is soooo bad! It's gonna make China get up off its ass and finally give Intel some actual competition!!!"
And here I am, thinking that we all stand to benefit if Intel got some actual competition.
The soonest way China gets SOTA computing chips is to provide the chips from US factories. (And then the Chinese build the tools to nuke said factories.) Let them develop their own competing technology. That at least gives a 10-20 year window where the US is "safe" from higher tech nukes. Handing it over to them for a profit gives zero time window.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
They can press the chips into import.
Lenovo builds servers, lenovo buys in bulk Chinese government takes what it needs from lenovos stock. Problem solved.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
Are we going to end up with the Chinese buying games consoles in order to source their microprocessors, like Gaddafi was rumoured to do or will they move to AMD's Opteron. Seriously, I fail to understand such a ban unless Intel was late in bribing, I mean donating to the Washington lobbying sector.
Lenovo still has to follow US export laws, and Lenovo can simply be embargoed. I don't think Lenovo even produces computers with Xeon CPUs (unless they come from the outdated China fab plant).
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I really do like the nerdiness of your comment attacking the anonymous messenger along with your reluctance to discuss the message. Anti-Americanism an histrionics aside, it is by now a sane business decision to avoid US products and services in certain markets -- as long as you are willing to accept the fact that the US is not the world.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Huh http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/s....
This should be translated as: "US bans Intel from selling Xeon Phi to China for nucelar testing simulation". Nobody in their right mind is really going to try to build a supercomputer in 2015 (or later) from commodity x86 Xeons that you'd use in webservers and what have you. Tianhe-2 already uses an older revision of Phi. Newer Phi products don't even require a host processor to boot the OS.
Why not just buy them in the US or in Canada and smuggle out? It is not like we have dogs trained to find them in luggage...
This is replay of the furor over strong encryption from the 1990ies — yes, it is good to know, Obama Administration recognizes there are some people out there, who may want to harm us, but the ban on sales seems as useless as prohibiting export of encryption. Any organization large enough to challenge the US, is large enough to be able to get it with little effort, ban or not.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As far i know Smic is capable of producing 28 nm logic.
http://www.smics.com/eng/foundry/technology/advanced_logic_28.php
That is one generation from 22 nm of Intel.
Can't the Chinese make their supercomputers w/ their Loongson or Allwinner CPUs?
They are not dependent on Intel chips. They can just make their own ARM chips, configure for performance rather than power efficiency, and add more of them. I hope we see China return the favor, where it hurts real good, to show that this sort of bullshit-bullying is not tolerated. Perhaps China will finally start making their own Intel-compatible chips, I mean this ISA has been around for so many decades it should have been free to manufacture long ago. Someone has to take the first step.
1945 tech nukes was plenty good enough to destroy entire cities, and China doesn't have just 2 of them but hundreds. What exactly is the point of delaying higher tech nukes?
This space intentionally left blank
This is a totally lost war for the US.
Sooner or later the chinese will own every technology and the same amount of weapons, and eventually they will be bigger and more powerful and they will start treating the US in the same way they are being treaten right now.
Good luck with your unfair and unethical restrictions.
The text says one things, but their graphs actually say another.. It's all very weird...
According to the *charts*, the ARM was the slowest performer. The charts also show only a blip of a performance bump out of a Phi, and that is insane. A phi can run circles around a Xeon (they can't yet match an nVidia for a lot of workload though). The perf/watt chart puts the ARM and Xeon in the same ballpark, but has Phi a lot worse (which makes some sense given the previous results, the 7120 uses a gobton of power, but they *should* be getting much much better performance based on what I've seen). There benchmarking seems out of whack.
There's also issues with the measurement methodology. They basically used different means of measuring each product, basically trusting the self-reporting provided by the vendors. If firmware miscalibrates the Intel parts, RAPL can be very very wrong. Additionally, the vendor equipment is generally not scientific grade exactly. Being off by 20-30% is not too uncommon depending on what you are talking about. Precisely measuring this is costly and generally only done for lab equipment, not as built in instrumentation. I know they are trying to be as precise and specific, but they need to settle for the point where they can use common instrumentation (i.e. the input power for them, though a computer design company has more precise instruments that could do this).
It's a massive imporvement compared to previous amateur hour studies, but higher quality work is still needed.
Isn't the definition of a super computer... a massively parallel computer?
...
So let's say I ban the highest Xeons.
Can't they just buy more middle-tier Xeons?
Furthermore, why the hell would they need a bleeding-edge super computer to accomplish something we did without any super computers in the 40's? A single iPhone has more power than the ENIAC... a TI-83 does too.
Lastly, you don't need modern nukes to become a part of the alliance of nuclear deterrent. You just need nukes that work.
If I were China, I would just use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. From the description, "It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers."
If they're banned from certain US technology and for purpose, then any route around that through any 3rd party would be illegal.
I doubt it would be illegal in China since the Chinese government makes the laws there. Besides governments are known to break even their own laws when it comes to anything they deem to be national security...unless torture is now legal in the US?
My usual mantra is "fuck China"
If that's indeed the case, get a life
Captha: bigoted
China already have 40 nm and 28 nm capabilities
I am in the field of chip design and have quite an extensive involvement with fabs in the Far East region
Currently China's SMIC is mass producing 28nm chips, and is getting ready to roll out their 20nm fab at the end of this year
That's SMIC, a commercial entity
China has been investing quite heavily in research for the past 2 decades, and currently it has many high tech research labs all around the country, in which they carry out all kinds of top notch researches - I will not discount the fact that in some Chinese research labs they are actively researching 10nm and below litho techniques
Furthermore, we do need to understand that there is a "GREATER CHINA" entity, which encompasses China, Hong Kong and Macau and Taiwan
TSMC of Taiwan has started producing 16nm chips for Apple, and TSMC has publicly admit that they are actively researching the 7nm and below territory
You may say "But that's Taiwan, they are not China" ... but hey, they are all Chinese, and they speak the same language, are all brought up under the same 5,000 year old culture
Now that America is showing its arrogance again, and in Greater China, America's arrogance has often been viewed as anti-Chinese RACISM to many of the ethnic Chinese in the Far East region
My dealing with the Far Eastern people tells me that (not only the Chinese, but also in Japanese and the Koreans), people there have a kind of "groupthink" mentality, in which they think little of themselves as individuals, and they are willingly sacrifice their own self-interests for the good of the whole
America's arrogance will not sit well with many of the ethnic Chinese in the Greater China region
How is anybody going to stop the people from Taiwan, especially those with the necessary knowledge, to decide to help out China to spite that racist Uncle Sam?
This is a pointless move, China has more than enough fab capability to build its own processor or just straight up copy intel's design.
Then China can get them from Israel - problem solved. It's not as if the current Israeli government is going to do what anyone tells them to do even with hollow threats of withdrawing aid money.
If I gave SGI a shitload of money I'd still have something that's only double that speed per core if I wanted something that's going to scale up into the thousands or cores. That's with Intel chips. With supercomputing all that intercommunication between the cores comes with a speed hit.
that's not what really happens.
what happens is they get just chips that burn more power per cpu and just burn more coal to cover the power use.
it's not like they can't build the damn thing without the latest xeons.
but what happens is that NSA and DOD can buy the chips cheaper.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
people are talking about papers. its pointless. same as chinese problem. too much people struggling each other leading to a stupid apocalipse. how much time will remains for china economy slows down? they need to handle their babies without guns anyway.
AFAICTL a supercomputer is basically a large linux cluster nowadays. Regular CPUs can be used to build it. What' so special about Xeons? Hardly they are order of magnitude more powerful than regular CPUs. Could anybody clarify?
See subject: You'll find THIS *very* interesting -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* I certainly did... it's a graphical map of *EVERY NUCLEAR BOMB BLOWN OFF* during testings or otherwise, by every nation that possessed those devices over the timeframe noted (drops off bigtime in the 90's iirc).
(It's a VERY creative piece of work imo, & quite cool).
APK
P.S.=> You may find it useful in debates/discussions such as this one, regarding the data you speak of... apk
Just for starters - literally tons of weight along with the associated size, complexity, and reliability of the bomb. Tuneability. Practical and strategic value.
Seriously - do you really think cruise missiles today carry five TON payloads?!
I'm assuming you were speaking of WWII by that ref to 1945. By '53 the US had a 'mortar' that could fire something with that yield.If you can call something in a 280mm size a 'mortar' anyway, but I suppose it fits the technical description. heh. By '63 the US had 340 kiloton models weighing in at less that 750 pounds. The B41 was a triple stage thermonuclear warhead in the very early 60's - 61 or 62 most likely. That was 25 megatons in five tons. Just imagine the scary crap available today...
Try learning something about the field before posting please. =)
Maybe one that doesn't automatically steal all of your AES128 keys?
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.