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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.
If (yeah, I know) the Chinese are developing nuclear bombs, this will hold them up for maybe a couple of years.
China has been a declared nuclear weapons state since 1964.
They are doing what we are doing now - modeling how the weapons work because many of us agreed not to physically test them any more over twenty years ago.
It's not like China doesn't have FABs and engineers that could make a similar CPU. What Intel fears the most is this will kickstart some national pride that's going to end with gov't funded R&D to make high end CPUs and GPUs.
You are wrong. The Chinese do not have the FABs. In fact no one else but Intel has FABs at that node. Everyone else is like 2 years behind and the Chinese FABs are like 6 years behind. There are export restrictions on advanced lithography equipment and the only litho manufacturers are in the US, Europe and Japan. Namely Ultratech, ASML, Canon and Nikon.
Their chip design is over a decade behind the west. Just look at Longsoon or the licensed ARM processors companies like Mediatek manufacture.
Exactly right - Intel's development fab is in Hillsboro, Oregon. They get the fab process working there, and then document the hell out of it and reproduce that billion+ dollar facility in their production fabs around the world - Costa Rica, Philippines, Malaysia, etc. Then they tear out the inside of the development fab and start over for the next generation. Periodically they need a bigger building footprint, so they build another dev fab next door and assign the previous dev fab to be a production fab at that node for products until they're done with it.
That would be what this campus does.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Well they are. The design is made in the USA or Israel and the manufacturing is done in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Israel, etc. The list of sites is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Costa Rica is where Intel does wire bonding and puts the metal head spreader on the chip. Wire bonding is labor intensive so cheap labor is important to make it cost effective. It is not where they manufacture the chip. Malaysia is where AMD does wire bonding and attaches the metal heat spreader.
Intel and AMD usually say 'diffused in XXX' which is the hard and export restricted bit, and 'assembled in YYY' which is hand labor intensive non-export restricted bit.