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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.
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.
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
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!
They wouldn't even bother with the clustering of Lenovo stuff - they'd just unsocket the CPU and put it into the supercomputer nodes, and then give back the CPU-less server to Lenovo by way of "RMA" or something else, hiding the fact that there is no CPU in it when they get it back. Then, Lenovo refurbishes it (sockets another CPU) and sells it again at a slight discount.
Like the US Department of Commerce would have any clue if that was happening or not.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
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).
Intel moves their HQ out of the US and continues to operate as usual.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
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.
If I recall, as plutonium ages, helium builds up in the crystal lattice. This might have a performance impact on the weapon yield. I'm not sure if the cores are ever smelted back down and reformed to deal with this problem; if it's even a problem in fact. Haven't a clue. Other than old stockpile simulation testing, I'm not sure what else could be the point in all this.
Life is not for the lazy.
Intel fabrication plants are mostly in the US, with one in Israel, one in Ireland, and one in China (apparently a 65nm process plant, so definitely not their most cutting edge stuff). Yeah, surprised me too when I looked it up.
Then I thought a bit about it, and it's perhaps not so surprising. The last thing Intel wants is to lose their edge in the *process* of making those chips. Considering that it probably costs them up to $10 billion to set up a fab plant, labor costs probably aren't exactly the big expense there. As good as the Chinese are at cloning technology, it seems pretty unlikely they'd be able to clone the latest chips so easily unless they new the tech for the latest low-nm processes, and from what I can see, Intel isn't giving them the opportunity.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
It's not just that. The Chinese have been working on miniaturization of their nuclear warheads so can they make them road mobile and submarine launched. They also are working on stealth aircraft, advanced radar, and the like. So you can bet they could use the processing power.
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
Intel just received a flood of orders from China. Thousands of people have each ordered one Xeon processor each.
It's harder than you think it is.
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.
They don't have the machine tools, they don't have the knowledge to do advanced chip design, they can't do it. Period.
Sure they might do it with a monster project in like a decade, but by then the industry will have moved beyond the current point.
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).
Apple assembles things in China. The actual chip manufacturing is done in Taiwan and the USA.
Intel does not manufacture CPUs in East Asia. The only 'Asian' manufacturing site is in Israel.
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.
AC, just to clarify to you and everyone else: I'm *NOT* a nuclear physicist or weapons expert. My only (basic) knowledge of the subject is based on publicly available read material over time.
Life is not for the lazy.
If I recall, as plutonium ages, helium builds up in the crystal lattice. This might have a performance impact on the weapon yield. I'm not sure if the cores are ever smelted back down and reformed to deal with this problem; if it's even a problem in fact. Haven't a clue. Other than old stockpile simulation testing, I'm not sure what else could be the point in all this.
Smelting Plutonium sounds like one of life's more complex engineering problems.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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
IIRC Apple constructs its MacPro's in the US.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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....
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.
Can't the Chinese make their supercomputers w/ their Loongson or Allwinner CPUs?
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
Not 14 mm. Their claims of 28 nm are doubtful. They buy litho tools from outside and they don't have permission to buy 28 nm grade tools.
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.
True, I don't think the yield is the concern, I think the worry is that the bomb will fail to detonate. Since the Chinese have nuclear power stations that shouldn't matter as they can replace the plutonium with new plutonium from time to time I would have thought.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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?
Although you may be in the field of chip design, you don't appear to be as knowledgeable about the field of sino-taiwanese politics. Given the politics of the folks in charge at TSMC, I'm not sure they would side with China over the USA. Many of them exited China during the cultural revolution and generally have a dim view of the Mainland.
In fact, the chairman of TSMC (morris chang, a harvard, mit, stanford alum) cut his teeth in the semiconductor business in the USA (in TI and General Instruments) before being recruited back by the Taiwanese government to found TSMC. Other than being born in mainland china, he's about as American as you can get (fwiw, he was also the guy in charge of bringing us TI's wonderful speak-n-spell). He's also on record supporting the Wassenaar Arrangement even though Taiwan isn't a signator, and I think I remember hearing that most of his daughters attended school and live in the US.
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.
There are pro-mainland-china parties active in taiwanese politics. Whether the core is a plant or whatever is not really relevant when the numbers are large enough to make a difference.
So it appears that your criticism is based on a very simplistic view that is not matched by the more messy reality.
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.
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?
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.