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.

Comments

Hello? The 21st Century Calling

[gtall]

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.

Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling

[LWATCDR]

You mean like Lenovo?

Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling

[MachineShedFred]

Exactly.

"You aren't allowed to sell Xeon parts to but you are still allowed to ship millions of them to Lenovo. And if a couple pallets of CPUs fall off the back of the 747... well, whatyagonnado?"

Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling

[Kagato]

I'm sure the Chinese Gov't would be more than happy to have the US Gov't check the serial numbers on those Xeon chips to tell were the source is. Obviously not. As long as the chips are allowed to be exported to China for general business use I don't see any way for the US to control it. At best whatever quasi Gov't agency in China has to buy through a 3rd party and falsify some paperwork

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.

Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling

[cheesybagel]

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.

Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling

[pla]

Are you somehow incapable of understanding how export control laws work? If they're banned from certain US technology and for purpose, then any route around that through any 3rd party would be illegal.

Aaand... China cares about that why?

"Yes, we'd like to order 33,000 ThinkStation P700s, please? Yes, two E5-2697's, please. No, no OS. No memory either. Also no storage. Video card... hold on, let me ask our chief res... er... office manager... Okay, yes, how many Tesla K80's can you fit in one of those? Let's go with that, then. Do you take UnionPay? No? Hmm, gold bullion? Wow, rough checkout process here! Paypal? Great! Oh, can I get a tracking number when you ship it? Thanks."

Are you somehow incapable of understanding that you can't magically stop someone from getting milk while continuing to sell them live cows?

Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling

[cheesybagel]

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.

Soon this will be impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Awesome job guys!

[slykens]

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.

Actions have consequences.

[pla]

"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).

Re:Actions have consequences.

[nojayuk]

Actually China's nuclear arsenal is a fraction of the US and Russian arsenals. It's about the same size as France's (250 - 300 warheads) but China doesn't have a deployable ballistic missile submarine fleet to provide the sine qua non of the Big Boys, a guaranteed second-strike retaliatory capability. They're working on building that capability but it's not operational at the moment.

China has signed but not yet ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) but its last shot was in 1996 after 45 tests in total. The only other nation in the Big Five who has not ratified the CTBT is the US who stopped testing in 1992 after firing off over 1000 devices.

Yet more proof the legislators are clueless

[JustNiz]

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.

Re:So, were are they assembled or fabed?

[MachineShedFred]

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.