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China Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer Without U.S. Chips (computerworld.com)
Reader dcblogs writes: China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors. There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops (Linpack is 93 petaflops), according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level. But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers. The U.S. initiated this ban because China, it claimed, was using its Tianhe-2 system for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. stopped live nuclear testing in 1992 and now relies on computer simulations. Critics in China suspected the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts. There has been nothing secretive about China's intentions. Researchers and analysts have been warning all along that U.S. exascale (an exascale is 1,000 petaflops) development, supercomputing's next big milestone, was lagging.
This happens when you don't allow export of your chips to someone who has the knowledge to design their own chips.
It gives them the incentive to accelerate development and deployment of their homegrown designs.
Not only do you lose a business opportunity, you're also in danger of losing your technology leadership.
Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?
Hopefully they reverse engineered out all the spy shit that gets built into anything made by a US company (who can be served a national security letter demanding they insert backdoors and not tell anyone about it). Not saying the Chinese won't build their own spy shit into their own chips, but it only makes sense to drop products made by US companies.
On the other hand, aren't all the 'US made chips' actually made in China anyway, and its really just the intellectual property that is US? And the Chinese don't really give a shit about US intellectual property ownership anyway?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Is that some wounded american pride I see?
A computer built with hardware that was NOT made in China, that would be news.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It really is non-US chips no matter how they got the original blueprints. The notion of US intellectual property in China is laughable at best. Additionally, China may not have a lot of folks that can invent, and that pretty much goes for all other countries because Intel is actually that good at being a brain drain but I digress, but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing on quite remarkable scales. So while they may not invent the process for 5nm chips, once they see one done and get a few pictures of the process, they're pretty good at putting the pieces together to get up and running.
However, it is my opinion that the bigger point here isn't that China is great at stealing technology, it is that China, and more so the world, honestly doesn't need American technology especially if the Americans are so hell bent in making insecure devices and resorting to petty trade restrictions to maintain some sort of faux-superiority position because the American legislative body finds in unstylish to fund actual research to maintain a real superiority position or they feel that real superiority is found in funding some guy digging a tunnel to extract black rocks, pumping dead liquid dinosaur remains from the ground, or ensuring that humans build crap at ineffective rates.
If anything Americans should take this as a sign that their priorities are insanely messed up. Doubtful that they would actually do anything about it, but at least they can know that all their Jerry Springer level bickering will ultimately mean that they need to resort to more and more useless childish games on ensuring that they stay relevant on the global stage. The downside to that is that the rest of the world has to suffer these stupid antics because Americans can't grow up and admit that they're loosing the top spot.
This is my guess as well. Not to bag on the Chinese, but I feel like this is a dog-n-pony show to show up the U.S. Gov't who denied them Xeons.
It's the same way the US government responsed in the late 80s/early 90s about strong encryption. To get a copy of PGP I had to click through all kinds of legalese and forms certifying that I was in fact not going to export it to foreign countries. They seriously considered strong encryption to be munitions, like bullets and bombs. They still do the same thing over Generation III nightvision equipment - civilians can have it, but if you try to take it out of the country it's federal prison time.
That mentality might have had a chance to work when two conditions were true: we didn't have a global communications network with massive participation, and we actually had our own manufacturing base. Times have changed. The US's actions here are just denying themselves a business opportunity and causing a resurgence of national pride and achievement for foreign nations. If the intention was to "keep them down", it's having the opposite effect.
China may not have a lot of folks that can invent ... but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing
Do you see the problem with this sentence?
Absolutely.
What this news tell us is Intel could have sold 10 million cores but was forbidden from doing so. The money that could have gone Intel's way have been used to improve Chinese chip manufacturing and the USA has failed to achieve the goal of stopping China from building a supercomputer more advanced than the best one in USA.
Hilarious
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
So, not homegrown, more like "homecloned" from US chips and then enhanced.
In other words, the hard work was already done, and they just took it.
Think back to when Chips & Technologies made their own IBM PC-AT chipset (5 chips replacing the 63 the PC-AT used). It was nothing more than a clever clone... but once the clone happened it set in motion companies other than IBM to develop the standard. Think, for a moment, of the first 80386 system: the Compaq DeskPro 386. That was an original design, not cloned from IBM.
Yes, I completely agree. This is a "homecloned" system - for now. The next version is likely to have some innovations; the version following even more. Within 5 generations it will be it's own system.
But that statement in itself isn't worth anything. You where teaching filtered Chinese Students in a elite topic, outside of China. Some part of a given is that they will be better than the locals, based on the fact they are export.
That said, the statement is worth something, as a cultural examination.