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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.
As for Via, no idea, but that would raise the question of who inherited the Cyrix/Centaur IP
FTFY. It seems they continue to sell their CPUs, though these designs and processes don't look exactly new. https://www.viatech.com/en/sil...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Congratulations! Your English is great! Better than the headline in fact!
It looks like they copied the headline from the source article but bizarrely omitted one word and a piece of punctuation making the whole thing unintelligible. The actual title should be:
"China Finds Zen: Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP"
Which is kind of a dumb pun based on the fact that they're copying AMD's Zen microarchitecture.
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AMD holds a 51 percent stake in HMC... HMC owns the x86 IP and ends up producing the chips, which satisfies the AMD and Intel x86 cross-licensing agreements because the IP remains with a company owned primarily by AMD. ... To stay within the legal boundaries, HMC licenses the IP to Hygon, which designs the x86 chips and then sells the design back to HMC. HMC then employs a foundry to fab the end product (likely China Foundries or TSMC). Confusingly, HMC then transfers the chips back to Hygon (the same company that designed them), which then sells the Dhyana processors. ... According to the agreement, the final products can only be sold within China's borders.
They get 50% of the revenue from these chips, and they have the potential to get close to 100% marketshare in China once the Chinese government forces Chinese companies to use Chinese made processors.
AMD owns 51% of HMC, a "front" company that exists to work around Intel/AMD IP agreements.
AMD owns 30% of Hygon, the "real" company in this deal, well sort of "real", more below.
AMD will likely see very little profit from HMC as HMC will likely sell the finished chips to Hygon at or near cost.
OK, so AMD still has 30% of Hygon? Yes in theory, but Hygon will likely not be designed to capture much of the revenue of the domestic x86 trade. Hygon will likely subcontract to 100% Chinese owned companies where some of the real profits will be realized, and will likely sell the CPUs to 100% Chinese owned companies at a low price and these companies will capture much of the remaining profits. Maybe not in year 1 but by year 5 the preceding eco system will likely be complete.
In short the accounting will be engineered to avoid having to pay AMD very much, as we see with US companies engineering the accounting to avoid paying US taxes.
And the sad part is that AMD is smart enough to see it coming. But desperation leads them to maybe a few years of some revenue, hoping that it will be the bridge they need to return to full health.
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.