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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.
a machine that can play Crysis on medium settings. The world waited with abated breath.
How many nude photo's did they have to send in to get the loan to built that thing?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fe7e...
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
http://top500.org/news/china-t...
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6...
http://www.netlib.org/utk/peop...
Or my (rejected) submission at https://slashdot.org/submissio...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I was curious what OS it runs. TOP500 says "Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5". Googling "Sunway" is just giving me some Malaysian resort town, and "RaiseOS" yields nothing at all. Does anyone know anything about this OS? Is it Linux?
Yes but, how many of the chips are clones or copies?
Questions for those who know: Tianhe-2 is notoriously hard to program for. Will this be any better? And will USA ever catch up?
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
The article mentions that the cluster uses "ShenWei CPUs" but doesn't give details, and the wiki only talks about chips that were released in 2010 and earlier. Is it using the Alpha instruction set (as Wikipedia seems to imply), or does it have additional instructions, or is it using something else entirely? Can you buy these things (and compatible motherboards) of AliExpress? Do they have an equivalent to IME?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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 quadrillion? That's alot of flops.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
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.
Other than the singular purpose of doing the rare but interesting exascale problem the real utility of figuring out how to build exascale is to figure out how to build petascale cheaply on the "desktop". DOE's target for exascale is a scalable architecture that will sip mere megawatts of enegy this means that when they get there petawatt will be of the order of magnitude of 10KW. in other words, something easily power by a car engine. it will mean that petascale will be ubiquitous. Every hospital could have one in their basement.
the Titan super computer at oakridge has 299,008 cores and 18petaflops. if they built 5 of these they could hit 91 petaflops with 1.5 million cores. That's ten time fewer than the chinese super computer requires.
Now cores ain't everything. ultimately it's petaflops per watt but I don't have those statistics so I'm using cores as a proxy. I will admit that there is a school of thought in computer that having a lot of slow low power cores may be better than fewer fast high power cores whenever the bottleneck is memory bandwidth. And since I don't know the chinese architecture I don't know if that's what they are doing here.
Nonethe less. for mere factors of 10, brute forcing is always possible and doesn't really advance the state of the art--- that is, you cant scale that to factors of 1000 by brute force. You have to drop the power per petawatt to get anywhere. Scaling up to more cores can even be counter productive for any problem involving long range coupling between cores. Thus while it gets you more embarassingly paralell flops it doesn't get you better calculations on real problems.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The older systems, like Longson, are MIPS using a questionable license with patent problems.
These systems are directly derived from DEC Alpha.
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.
Kriston
So the moral of the story here ought to be that while the USA may be a tech leader, it isn't as if there are not tech centers in the rest of the world more than capable of building technology on the leading edge.
So when people the like the FBI director make asinine statements like how people will switch to non US crypto technologies and message platforms only 'theoretically' they should respond with laughter.
CONgress and the Administration need to pull their heads out of their assess (which will be hard given how far up there they are) and realize that if they insist on stupid export controls and technology that legally has to be broken by design; they will accomplish none of their security goals and only harm our economy in the process.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
I used to teach a pretty decent load of Chinese students in my classes in Manhattan (I taught at both NYU and on CUNY). By the '00s, they were significantly more creative, sophisticated, well-rounded, and learned (I make no claims about "intelligence") than my American students, who were really sort of "decadent" in the worst, stereotypical ways—knew only a few things about a few things but a lot about consumer goods and fashion, and didn't seem to think they needed to work, just didn't feel the global pressure from competing workers. Very entitled.
The Chinese students tended to cluster in 'A' territory and always approached me after class to talk about class topics until I had to leave, then followed up with serious questions by email. The American students always had one or two in the 'A' group and the rest clustering around low B and high C, and it was a struggle just to learn their names, as they had nothing at all to say to me unless I called on them in class. Ironically, many of the Chinese students had better formal English as well, though there were always also about half that were clearly 'winging it' and needed ESL—but were killing it in class performance anyway, managing to learn and to get through books by relying on a dictionary, a study group, and sheer determination.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It's entirely possible this is an extravagant expense to hit #1 in Top500, but not able to do anything else. Looking at the architecture, about all that system can do is run xhpl really good. They talk about practical applications, but it seems the described system skimps on all sorts of things that would be important for real work, but not needed as much for xhpl benchmark runs.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
What is their number? Let me give them a ring.
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?
Like Gremlin, or Pacer, or maybe Edsel. To be able to compete in the car market with the rules levied from WW2, I would say they did OK.
Jimmy Breslin, the New York Daily News columnist, was the first to discover the ascendency of Chinese science students in NYC.
He saw that the top scorers in the computer game machines at Bronx High School of Science all had Chinese names.
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?
Companies like Intel and AMD actually do have their own domestic fabs. It's one reason AMD has had such a hard time keeping up with Intel - these facilities literally cost billions. It takes a ton of capital to shrink process sizes, design new chips, and retool equipment.
A lot of components on a motherboard would be made abroad, as well as the circuit boards you see on the back of a hard drive or SSD. What really gets made overseas though, is all the embedded chips found in things like cars, TVs, stereos, and appliances. These are usually microcontrollers (likely 8-bit) or nothing much more powerful than a Z80 CPU. This isn't nearly pushing the envelope of technology, it's well-known components that just need to get produced. It makes sense to go with the cheapest volume manufacturer and right now, that's going to be someplace in Asia.
Yes, it's crazy. I work for UK company that makes imaging that could conceivably be used in nuclear research, and we basically cannot sell to some countries because of that same bullshit. License denied because the authorities believe that the equipment may be used in a location other than that given in the end-user statement (not because of any specific information, just blanket excuse for those countries). But the fact is that there are competitors elsewhere that can sell into those countries, and in some cases upcoming domestic competition in those countries, so the regulations are doing nothing except to put money into the hands of overseas companies at our expense. Bloody joke.
These systems are directly derived from DEC Alpha.
I seriously wonder where they got the Alpha stuff from. Did HP (after the DEC merger) sell it off (Carly?), was it stolen outright?
I for one mourn the Alphas, they packed serious punch. If only HP had kept those on instead of Itanic... we might be seeing a
bit more diversity in CPUs than what's essentially a duopoly x86 / ARM (yes, I know there's still SPARC etc., but seriously...).
Time to order millions of Chinese CPUs on alibaba
the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers
That's OK...they'll just use pulls from all the e-waste we ship over there.
But...but...but..Aren't the Chinese supposed to be just imitators?
It does, and it beats the living daylights out of the smaller, inferior American computers. So start learning how to suck it up, because as an American you'll have to do it over, and over, and over again during this century.
I'm pretty sure the American students can still find gainful employment in the field of programming, the music industry, the film industry, or at least in high-speed pizza delivery.
Ezekiel 23:20
> was it stolen outright?
About 20 years ago, our IT manager at DEC noticed an extremely large download being made to the office in Japan over the weekend. He killed the connection and investigated. They were accessing the Alpha design docs and got away with pretty much everything. They were just starting to download the process docs and didn't get very far. So we at the time knew we'd see something Alphaish popping up in China about a decade later. In 2006 the ShenWei appeared on the scene and it bore striking resemblance to the Alpha 21164A, the processor design docs that happened to be downloaded that weekend long ago.
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.
93 petaflops in linpack. Nothing theoretical about that. Go back to pouting in your mom's basement. Jingoism and chanting is a jock thing.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The Chinese ability to reverse engineer being a superpower is a hoax. They can't even design jet engines and still have to buy them from Russia, because in the very high tech it's about understanding the basis, not just copying a layout.
thankfully the US never committed wholesale IP theft? Oh wait.. they did...
Yes, The US Industrial Revolution Was Built On Piracy And Fraud
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130228/01324622146/yes-us-industrial-revolution-was-built-piracy-fraud.shtml
Perhaps "Alexander Hamilton" is Chinese in your mind?
Read his “Report on Manufactures" published 1791
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.
Not to hit against the "Chinese are hard working and intelligent" meme you got going there. But you are talking about NYU... its an Arts college. A ton of Actors come out there every year. Not exactly a STEM focused group. Your foreign students who are usually the most well off (financially and educationally) in their native countries aren't exactly going up against the best and brightest of America (again, in STEM fields). How would you rate the Chinese in Performance Arts or History or Social Sciences?
Additionally, keep in mind, most Americas don't ever need to work anywhere has hard in terms of labor nor have as many unfair obstacles as foreigners. They have no need nor pressure to push themselves to those extremes just to make a living. So they can take it easy and still have a life that is better off than 50/60/70% of the world?
Not to say that Indians, Japanese, Africans, and Chinese aren't giving the natives a run for their money. But lets keep things relative here. People who come here to study aren't exactly average nor grew up in an easy environment. I would accept the argument that the top 10% there are probably better and larger than our top 30%, but I think its a stretch to say that Americas are that far behind.
Oh, sorry. The ME is only for keeping an eye on our own citizens.
Have gnu, will travel.
I guess its time for the US to steal high-tech from China.
Not to hit against the "Chinese are hard working and intelligent" meme you got going there. But you are talking about NYU... its an Arts college. A ton of Actors come out there every year. Not exactly a STEM focused group.
NYU's machine learning graduate program is highly regarded and has been ranked among the top 10 in the nation.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I'm not sure any nation has put as much work into the development of semiconductor technology as the US. Yes, lots of work was done elsewhere, and yes, lots of people from elsewhere come to the US and work in academia or for private companies working on that technology, but I think the history of the development of computers puts the US in a rather special place; first country to develop a first completely electronic computer, the country that invented the transistor, and the first country to develop an integrated microprocessor was the US. So I'd say the US was at the forefront of a lot of innovations in computing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
*cough* TSMC *cough* And yes, I know they're pure-play, but their market cap...
There is also PowerPC but again not all that common.
I remember seeing the Alpha when it first came out and thinking wow that is cool, too bad it will be a really big hit. I kept asking the rep about mass market products that would use it and they looked at me like I was nuts.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
China is a billion strong, you're only going to see the best and brightest make it to top overseas Universities.
That reflects on what it takes to rise to the top in a large, overpopulated country with rampant poverty - you worked with the best of the best of the best.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
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.
As can be said of most innovation--building on the shoulders of giants.
I don't think any reliable figures exist for Intel's R&D budget, much less the grant money they receive, but you can be sure there is plenty of government interference applied. I doubt they are influencing the direction of research, but the final product certainly has seen government influence.
I'd say it's more casual racism.
I am always somewhat stunned by posts like this. People seem to think that "entity1" did it before so it's ok if "entity2" does it now, even when "entity1" did their bad deed a long time ago. Most bizarre. This is firmly in the "two wrongs DO make a right" camp.
The frame rate would be so high that the demons would be real!
You can hit ridiculously high numbers of FLOPS if you throw enough cores at it. Folding@home hits about 100 petaFLOPS this way. They're currently at about 200,000 CPUs + GPUs. If they could get 10 million participants, that would project out to 5 exaFLOPS, easily surpassing anything else in the top 500 list. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some criminal botnet is the "fastest supercomputer" by this measure.
https://laotsao.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/sw1600-and-alpha-21164/.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
The Loongson used unpatented MIPS instructions, only to license the patented instructions later. It is not an encumbered implementation.
Companies like Intel and AMD actually do have their own domestic fabs. It's one reason AMD has had such a hard time keeping up with Intel - these facilities literally cost billions.
AMD has been fabless since 2009.
It's arbitrary, but top500 measures the largest systems by their ability to execute xhpl. It's not the *most* interconnect sensitive thing in the world, but it would not fare well on a folding@home, world community grid, etc type application.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I've run a bit of diging on the SW64 chip that reportedly powered the new ShenWei supercomputer
Based on the info I've gathered from http://bbs.lemote.com/forum.ph...
Version 1 of SW64 was 'inspired' by DEC's Alpha 21364 architecture instruction
By Version 3 (circa 2010), according to the same source, they have something called EKOPath, which, reportedly integrate AMD's X64 instuctions onto Alpha's platform
As Version 3 of the SW64 chip only comes in (max) 16-core, I believe the SW64 chip that are being used in the ShenWei supercomputer is of the latter version (because they supposed to have 64 cores per node)
Version 1, 2, and 3 of the SW64 chip has L1, L2 and L3 cache built in. The SW64 chips that are being used for the new ShenWei supercomputer reportedly doesn't have L1, L2, nor L3 cache at all
Furthermore, the frequency of chip has also increased from 1.1GHz to 1.45GHz, indicating a possible chip node shrinkage from the 65nm to a possible 28nm node that China currently possesses
That is about what I manage to gather so far
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Don't confuse can't with won't. China has some incredible engineers. You should know them, the USA educates a heck of a lot of them.
That worked in the 70's and maybe 80's, but today it's absurd considering the over the counter available tech that exists combined with the manufacturing being in east Asia now and only a small part of the high tech manufacturing is done in the US or Europe.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
And they are packed with foreign students because our educational system has been priced out of reach of lower and middle income families due to short-sighted political decisions driven primarily by corporate tax avoidance. Tax avoidance by corporations leads to overly costly education? Yes, because now there aren't enough corporate taxes to fund our public educational institutions so tuition can be free like it was in the days when the political asshats now in control went to school.
Only I can judge you.
And that matters why?
Only I can judge you.
Not going to comment on Intel's Larabee / Knight's Landing issue here because I don't know
From the info as have gathered, the first version of SW64 chip did have some built in cache, but by the new version of SW64 used in the supercomputer, the SW64 has neither L1, nor L2, nor L3 cache
Each core is allocated 12 KB of instruction cache, along with 64 KB of local scratchpad
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I guess its time for the US to steal high-tech from China.
We already tried this recently, installing a bullet train in California. But the most powerful force for evil in the universe, California NIMBY and Luddite lawyers, has prevented the line from going anywhere.
It doesn't make it ok but it does mean that entity1 doesn't really get to complain about it unless they have apologized and made reparations for their past, and to some extent still ongoing (but better disguised), egregious behaviour in this regard. The OP is not saying that what the Chinese are doing is fine but simply that the US is in no position to complain about it because this is how they have behaved, and to some extent still are, behaving (only better disguised as a legal patent system which foreign companies find strangely hard to win against US ones).
That can't be! Just the other day we were authoritatively told the secure foreign cryptography was only theoretical.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So the U.S. tried to halt China's cheeky supercomputing effort by banning the sale of Intel's chips? Reminds me of Tonya Harding's attempt to kneecap a rival. And the U.S. deservedly got what Tonya got: a big fat loss.
You know, this entire fiasco reminds me of a woman's "solution" style. Was Hillary Clinton still at State when the Intel ban was hatched?
Look at the power figures. This is already a highly modified system. I think the term "inspired by" is closer than copied. (There seem to be claims that there was a copy made about 20 years ago, but that's a lot of development time ago.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But it does mean "entity1" shouldn't have a holier-then-thou attitude. After all, a thief complaining someone else steals from him never makes a very ethical-compelling case, and is being rather hypocritical.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
>>the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts.
How'd that work out for ya?
Well, at least according to Corney, they can't do crypto for shit.
Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind buying a computer with one of these Chinese chips in it. Better than one backdoored up the Yin Yang by a government that can actually ruin my chances in life for having the wrong opinions....Seriously, what do I care if the Chinese government spies on me? Why, that's correct, Mr Chen, my opinions on free speech are dangerously subsersive .... to China.
If you are going to get that specific, most colleges and universities fall into a Top 10 in many things.
But NYU is also Top 25 in Drama. #2 in Film for 2015 & 2014; #3 for 2013.
But...but...but..Aren't the Chinese supposed to be just imitators?
And you think their CPU design built on copied DEC Alpha ISA proves otherwise?
I used to teach a pretty decent load of Chinese students in my classes in Manhattan (I taught at both NYU and on CUNY). By the '00s, they were significantly more creative, sophisticated, well-rounded, and learned (I make no claims about "intelligence") than my American students, who were really sort of "decadent" in the worst, stereotypical ways—knew only a few things about a few things but a lot about consumer goods and fashion, and didn't seem to think they needed to work, just didn't feel the global pressure from competing workers. Very entitled.
The Chinese students tended to cluster in 'A' territory and always approached me after class to talk about class topics until I had to leave, then followed up with serious questions by email. The American students always had one or two in the 'A' group and the rest clustering around low B and high C, and it was a struggle just to learn their names, as they had nothing at all to say to me unless I called on them in class. Ironically, many of the Chinese students had better formal English as well, though there were always also about half that were clearly 'winging it' and needed ESL—but were killing it in class performance anyway, managing to learn and to get through books by relying on a dictionary, a study group, and sheer determination.
As a teacher, never ever stereotype anyone. Treat each student on their own metrics and not as a subset of some group that you deem them to be in.
There could be other explanations. In my case, I found out that Chinese students had already learned the material in their home country. This was their second go at taking the class in English.
Huh?
The chip in question is shen1-wei1, which is more like "superior-power" as in lots of MIPS (not wrath of god?).
The spaceship is slightly different shen2-zhou1, which is more like "divine-ship" rather than god's personal ship.
Firstly, although they have the same root (shen1), they are not the same character. Secondly, although they are pronounced similar (belying their shared root), they are pronounced with a different tone (one is 1st tone, one is 2nd tone). Saying god's ship would imply that it is the ship-of-god, where a divine ship is simply a ship that travels in the heavens (which is basically a spaceship, right?). In chinese, you might say God's boat like shen-de-zhou (God's own boat) which is not at all what people mean when they say spaceship.
Of course you can make up a literal translation that has completely bombastic implication, but you have to remember nouns in chinese are basically mostly compound connections of a limited set of "words" whose compound meaning does not translate directly from the translation of its components. If you want, you can do the same thing in english by twisting etymological root words (e.g., google "mortgage etymology" which yields "death pledge"), but nobody really means that shit even though it might be a legit translation.
FWIW, the historical name china gave itself was shen-zhou (divine state), which is probably why you see so much shen-this, shen-that... Although today calls itself more modestly and less heavenly/divinely zhong-guo (middle nation or perhaps central kingdom), "middle" or "central" doesn't really work as many places as divine...
If you read what the GP said, it never said it was "all right". In fact, I think it's pretty clear that GP was implying that violating IP rights isn't something to be proud of.
Two wrongs make two wrongs, and it's just fair that both are mentioned.
It seems you're complaining that somebody is presenting the full picture. It might be irrelevant, but hey, you're not complaining about it being offtopic.
Don't quote me on this.
The Chinese ability to reverse engineer being a superpower is a hoax. They can't even design jet engines and still have to buy them from Russia, because in the very high tech it's about understanding the basis, not just copying a layout.
Russia: 143 million
US: 319 million
China: 1357 million
China armed with Russia's tech is a 10x greater threat than Russia. They don't need the best anything to be a superpower, they just need to be able to drag you into a battle of numbers either in manpower, simultaneous threats or manufacturing capacity. Like the Russians fighting the Nazis, they were dying by the millions but Stalin kept sending more and more men to the front. Or Custer's last stand for example. Technology is far from everything in warfare.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
NASA has never purchased a Russian Engine. ULA (United Launch Alliance) purchases Russian engines for their Atlas rockets. By 2018 ULA isn't going to be doing launches because SpaceX is going to be 20X cheaper and is already validated to carry crew. That doesn't even factor in the other private launchers like Blue Origin that are gearing up as alternatives too.
It's funny, the Russians, French and ULA all laughed when SpaceX launched. They aren't laughing anymore, SpaceX is projected to take almost 30% of the launches next year and it's only going to get worse from there as they can beat everyone else on cost. All the national launch programs have never considered cost and will likely be priced right out of the market.
If the Chinese design is just a copy, then why hasn't anyone built this supercomputer from DEC Alphas?
Oh yes because copying things is such a wrong. It's not as if duplication was a core part of the universe and that humans have been copying each other's ideas since they first emerged. It's frankly ridiculous and arrogant to think anyone owns an idea.
It's more about not understanding history and being doomed to repeat it.
Entity group 1 has strong "IP" laws, which help them and hinder everyone else. Entity 2 is a younger, growing economy for whom the IP laws serve no purpose and are a burden, so they ignore them and grow the economy.
The US was there, now China is. Right or wrong, it just is. Why would you expect anyone to uphold a bunch of laws imposed from the outside that they had no hand in creating which hinder them to the benefit of the new guard. The US did exactly the same because it's human nature.
The final step will be of course when the Chinese economy matures further they will start to "respect" IP when it benefits them because they start developing new stuff which they don't want others to copy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The machine tools are still nearly all made in the US and Europe. But given the slow progress made in lithography tools in recent years denying them the last two generations of process technology isn't making as much of a difference as it used to.
You could argue that AMD K7 was like the spiritual successor of the DEC Alpha if you removed the X86 bits off. Same designers, same bus, and everything.
SPARC has seen worse times than this. Like the UltraSPARC V and Rock failures. The current chips are actually decent.
PowerPC has been essentially put on life support by the current IBM management. So I wouldn't expect much more out of that. Shame.
Yeah this has been a major sticking point in there. But China is developing at least four military aircraft engines right now. One of which (WS-10A) has been already been accepted into service in their twin-engine J-16 fighter bugs and all. They also have a large turbofan in testing for their Y-20 transporter plane. You can find pictures of it (WS-20) in the testbed on the Internet.
Typical. You didn't even bother to read what you posted a link to did you? It states unequivocally that the private company that contracts to do the government launches (ULA) uses russian engines but the US government itself has never used them. Just like I said. Of course you didn't bother to read that either.
You're so funny... You're about 20 years too late. In fact, it's a captain obvious moment.
As for the empire, we're not an empire. Never were, never wanted to be. That's crazy socialist crap designed to mislead stupid people like you.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
The Soviets produced about 80,000 T34s in WW2.
The Germans produced 1,300 Tigers.
If they all met in one big battle of doom, the Germans would have to achieve a kill (not hit) ratio of well over 50% or they'd run out of ammo before the Russians ran out of tanks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
> And that matters why?
It is quite difficult for a country to reach the top of the world in a particular technology because the people there have to be motivated to do the research and build the facilities for R&D. This is a struggle classified as "uphill". Competition is a good motivator. It seems that China's R&D is motivated, at any rate.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.