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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.
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.
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.
"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).
In other news, AMD stock goes through the roof.
You're acting like China won't still be able to get their hands on a stack of Xeons any time they want to with Lenovo and Foxconn both sitting inside their borders. Plus, AMD can't deliver anything close to Xeon performance, much less at the same power rating. Nobody wants to dump 10MW into a computer room and then evacuate that heat if they can do the same job in 6MW with 2.5x the performance*.
Looking at this really should shed some light on where high-end computing sits right now - AMD isn't even in the top 50, and anyone building nuclear weapons number crunchers doesn't give a damn about price.
* Intel Xeon E5-2699V3 averages 24601 on CPUMark in 145 watts TDW, where AMD FX-9590 8-Core scores 10273 on the same benchmark, in 220 watts.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
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.
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.
That would require a fab in china with Intel's process & capabilities. So far that doesn't exist in China (or Korea).
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.
I think all of the chips I've bought from Intel have been made in Malaysia or China.
Intel is actually substantially bizarre in their practices. The chips themselves are made in the US billion dollar fabs. Then very carefully packed into shipping containers and shipped to Malaysia, where they are removed from the shipping containers and inserted into the production packages. And then shipped to China and Taiwan to be put on boards (and small amounts back to the US to be sold retail by NewEgg).
Why the chip packaging step isn't so completely automated that it can be done for peanuts on site at the fab, I'm sure I don't know.
Huh http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/s....