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China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP (tomshardware.com)
Chinese-designed "Dhyana" x86 processors based on AMD's Zen microarchitecture are beginning to surface from Chinese chip producer Hygon. From a report: The processors come as the fruit of AMD's x86 IP licensing agreements with its China-based partners and break the decades-long stranglehold on x86 held by the triumvirate of Intel, AMD and VIA Technologies. Details are also emerging that outline how AMD has managed to stay within the boundaries of the x86 licensing agreements but still allow Chinese-controlled interests to design and sell processors based on the Zen design.
AMD's official statements indicate the company does not sell its final chip designs to its China-based partners. Instead, AMD allows them to design their own processors tailored for the Chinese server market. But the China-produced Hygon "Dhyana" processors are so similar to AMD's EPYC processors that Linux kernel developers have listed vendor IDs and family series numbers as the only difference. In fact, Linux maintainers have simply ported over the EPYC support codes to the Dhyana processor and note that they have successfully run the same patches on AMD's EPYC processors, implying there is little to no differentiation between the chips.
AMD's official statements indicate the company does not sell its final chip designs to its China-based partners. Instead, AMD allows them to design their own processors tailored for the Chinese server market. But the China-produced Hygon "Dhyana" processors are so similar to AMD's EPYC processors that Linux kernel developers have listed vendor IDs and family series numbers as the only difference. In fact, Linux maintainers have simply ported over the EPYC support codes to the Dhyana processor and note that they have successfully run the same patches on AMD's EPYC processors, implying there is little to no differentiation between the chips.
WTF?
English as a fifth language?!?!?
Does Via Technologies still exist?
I guess the bigger question is really if x86 should be the basis for a new processor initiative from China.
Intel is fucked as they not even ok for china to copy them.
English isn't my native language and I'm having some difficulties parsing "China Finds Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP". Is "China Finds" a proper noun? It's not mentioned anywhere else, but I can't make sense of that headline any other way.
One consumer cpu can do math.
Time for the 1980's NSA and its consumer chip super computer contractor adventures.
Buy 100000's more consumer CPU from contractors and enjoy doing more maths. With many more low cost consumer CPU's. They are for consumers so the cost is low.
Buy more CPU's from the contractor and the maths is faster again.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
translation: fabs owned by fairly high ranked party officials' brothers-in-law and making timely deposits to Panamanian accounts.
I assume they're talking about x86-64, which is modern AMD technology, and not actually the x86, which is decades old Intel technology. I can't imagine anyone would want to build x86s for anything but legacy devices.
Two questions arise: if they have licensed AMD's Zen architecture, does that allow them to support Intel's x32, which is the cross licensing exclusive that Intel and AMD have (or at least had), which allowed Intel to use AMD64 and AMD to use IA32? Or have we come to the point where it's no longer necessary to support 32-bit in x64?
As for AMD, this is the only way they can gain any significant marketshare anywhere - by taking their China partners and selling into China. In fact, those Chinese partners might as well acquire AMD directly, and make it all their own.
Intel is fucked as they not even ok for china to copy them.
More likely AMD is f'd if they felt desperate enough to engage in this short term benefit deal with long term negative consequences.
Good! AMD and Intel need competition in x86 chips. Duopolies usually provide narrow choices, and consumers can't do squat about it (big telecoms cough cough).
Table-ized A.I.
It wasn't a bad plan per se that Nixon and Kissinger came up with in the 1970s. However at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 the plan was obviously a failure and we should have adjusted trade relations appropriately.
Maybe Intel not fucked as they not even care for China copy technology old.
Except for half a dozen backdoors...
Once China gets good enough on their own to fab the chips without AMDs help, I don't see good things for AMD. Maybe they'll get sued, or attacked politically, or simply stop receiving payments for their IP use. China has always been #1 in the world at stealing others' hard work.
Wait..What? Apple still relies heavily on the x86 architecture..
in reality, Apple has changed its internal architecture more times than you've changed your underwear
AMD was f'd, so they mortgaged the future with this deal. They got $250M from this deal, which let them ship Ryzen in a timely manner. They may regret it later, but without the cash infusion they wouldn't have had a future to regret.
Many US companies have partnered with Chinese companies and it works great for a couple of years, until the Chinese company no longer needs anything from the US company. Once they get all the information they need, they have no reason to send any payments, or anything else, to the US company.
..
The reality is that culture and ethnicity are interdependent and there is absolutely no reason to assume that Chinese people, once lifted out of poverty will choose the same path as Europeans.
China has always been #1 in the world at stealing others' hard work.
Remind us all again:
Where were:
clocks,
paper,
porcelain,
iron smelting,
gunpowder,
the compass
invented? come on, now, tell us, little idiot
China IP laws make it so they don't need intel to say it's ok.
Interesting considerations. What "server-centric features"?
Other thoughts: What will happen in the future? If most manufacturing is done in China, will the U.S. become a poorer country?
Does Via Technologies still exist?
Does the google search engine still exist?
I guess the bigger question is really if x86 should be the basis for a new processor initiative from China.
Why not? They copy pretty much everything else so why stop now?
How do you tailor chips for the "Chinese server market"? I would have thought the ability to execute x86 instructions as fast and efficiently as possible would be enough for any market. I must be missing something.
What features do these chips have? What's the clock rate? What are some benchmark scores?
Financially, it makes a lot of difference if these Chinese CPUs are actually competitive.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
More like a Tesla is still vehicle with a width accommodating most normal roads. If Tesla came out with a car that was twice the width, it would be more analogous. They don't, for a similar reason - to maintain compatibility with older resources, in Tesla's case roads.
so you admit that x86 mode is about as useful as a hand crank? you have no clue what you are arguing
Do they come with the original American backdoors, or do they have their own Chinese version?
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Not being able to sell into a given market like a certain cell phone company makes a BIG difference.
"China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's" electronic circuit board/integrated circuit designs? Their...copyrighted designs? Their...architecture?
/. of all places should not confuse these types of things. This does not appear to be even be reverse engineered - it appears to just be a compatible, licensed-through-contract law clone similar to the early PC clones only without the cleanroom reverse engineering work.
I think what this article means is the latter, but there's some sense of expected ownership expressed that is simply not valid to posit.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
x32 is a 32bit ABI for x86_64 using 32 bit pointers. IA32 is intel's name for the x86 processor, later complemented with the incompatible IA64(Itanium) and then their respin of AMD's amd64 as EM64T, the two of which are collectively known as x86_64 since the userspace side of them is effectively the same.
IA32 code runs with only the 8ish GP registers of 32 bit x86 processors, whereas x86_64 has 16, providing a performance boost for a lot of code compared to IA32, a similar memory footprint, but no software compatibility with legacy x86/IA32 processors.
The reality is that culture and ethnicity are interdependent and there is absolutely no reason to assume that Chinese people, once lifted out of poverty will choose the same path as Europeans.
The educated young people are still opposed to the central government. The only thing keeping them in power is continued economic growth. I doubt that will work out in the long term.
But then if it does work, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to adopt their system. No one said democracy was perfect.
Secure them from the NSA, but not from the Chinese NSA.
So hard to decide who to protect yourself from anymore. I can only hope the chinese are as lax with their encryption keys as they are with their licensed MMO source code. If they are, it will be a good day for us who want a fully rooted x86 cpu including Secure Processor core.
Implications for Apple???
"x86" is kind of a generic name of a "line of" processors, similar to the System/360 "architecture" even though current machines go beyond the original System/360.
English is almost inherently lossy anyhow such that it's probably not worth debating. One can use "the x86 line" to hopefully indicate a more generic implication.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm sure it isn't that difficult to copy a chip once you have the mask of it but the question is do they understand how that chip supposedly works? A lot of actual chip design is computer based and learning how that works can take years? It means they can make copies but not necessarily advance the design.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
AMD just destroyed future of the Chinese processor market for US companies.
This deal makes attempts to deny processor sales to China for policy reasons impossible.
This deal has a weird forward and back process to get around Intel cross licensing. This forward and back scheme is OBVIOUSLY engineered to be abused by China. The OBVIOUS future action is for China to defraud AMD by abusing this forward and back process. Intel will be left with suing the husk of a defrauded and bankrupt AMD as their only option.
In effect this deal will both rob AMD and Intel without Intel ever agreeing to anything with China.
The Trump administration is completely incompetent and dangerously negligent in allowing this deal. This deal outweighs all the other considerations the administration has been blowing hard about. This deal is a huge blow to the US.
Boycott AMD NOW in order to destroy them before they can transfer too much ability to the Chinese. The sooner AMD dies the better for the US, free civilization and humanity..
Hygon will not be content with Zen, Zen is just the starting point for them. AMD will lose more due to lost sales of AMD CPUs than they will gain from Hygon CPUs. The Hygon CPUs will not be complementary products, they will be substitute products. You are delusional if you think this is just a way to get another 5 years of sales out of Zen. Plus its delusional to think that AMD will be getting much of those Hygon CPU sales despite the ownership stakes. Profits will be diminished through financial engineering.
China does not just take foreign technology and sit idly by with it. They take foreign technology and use it to move their current capabilities ahead many years if not decades. Getting Zen is a similar effort. A professor of mine got to tour a manufacturer in China who had a contract to make motorcycle engines for a Japanese company, of course they were trained for Japan's tech and quality standards. Next door to the motorcycle engine factory was a construction project. The professor asked what was going up there. He was told that's our new automobile engine factory being built.
I agree thats why intel must have competition.
China + CPU + ML+ AI + Robotics+ Inexpensive + Products + Exports = World Domination
Casteism