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China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP (tomshardware.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the aggressive-expansion dept.

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.

11 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Triumvirate?! by aaarrrgggh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Triumvirate?! by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:Triumvirate?! by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      bigger question is really if x86 should be the basis for a new processor initiative

      China may be hedging its bets by investing in both kinds of CPUs: x86 and ARM.

      Some argue x86 is dying, but x86 has more server-centric features than ARM, and is thus is still popular for server farms. (At least the x86 server features are more mature.)

      I wonder if GPU's will overtake both of these, or at least push x86 and ARM into being mostly coordinators. Perhaps the market will shift to specialized chip-sets for AI, databases, graphics, etc., and x86 or ARM will mostly function as process coordinators which dish out specific tasks to specialized CPUs.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    3. Re:Triumvirate?! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      x86 turned out to be good even though it's crap, at least for high performance applications.

      People thought that RISC was the way forward for performance, because you could make simpler hardware that would allow higher clock frequencies and more parallelism. But it turned out that you could use CISC instruction sets like x86 as an intermediate language that you recompiled on the fly, optimizing for each specific CPU and even the other threads executing in parallel in a way that no compiler ever could.

      So for performance x86 is great, even if it's not really what x86 CPUs actually execute internally. For power consumption RISC is much better, as we have seen with ARM.

      Of course all this is talking generally, for specific applications the answer might differ.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Re:China Finds Begins Production... by ArchieBunker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just business as usual at Slashdot. Incoherent summaries and easily spotted typos. On a side note does that mean I can buy these knockoff processors from Alibaba for a fraction of AMD's prices?

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  3. More likely AMD is f'd by drnb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:More likely AMD is f'd by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Not how China rolls. Their typical pattern is:
      1. Buy the full service product, the Chinese learn to use it.
      2. Buy the product, the Chinese learn to operate/maintain it.
      3. License the product, the Chinese learn to manufacture it.
      4. Watch a Chinese clone take over your market.

      Though the latter seems plausible though, anyone care to guess if those Chinese "special needs" are backdoors for the government? Then it would make sense that there's no user-visible changes...

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:More likely AMD is f'd by drnb · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  4. Re:Sorry, learn me some English, please by Daetrin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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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    This Space Intentionally Left Blank
  5. Until they don't by raymorris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:China Finds Begins Production... by ArchieBunker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't care what intelligence the Chinese government collects on me. Uncle Sam is a different story.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard