China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture 240
MrSeb writes "According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China's reliance on western intellectual property. There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture. What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:my question is (Score:2, Insightful)
Are there 2 billion consumers in the marketplace who will purchase goods and services related to that arch?
Alternatively: Does a bear shit in the woods?
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
There are only two differences between communism and capitalism:
1. which small group gets to make the decisions
2. which small group (same as in #1) is controlling the surveillance.
In communism, it's government/political leaders. In capitalism, it is the upper corporate echelon.
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
A backdoor standard would get them an expert medal in footshooting. Eventually some other country would find the backdoor and then be able to spy on all their businesses.
This is one of the arguments that killed the Clipper Chip -- if Skipjack ever was broken, or the LEAF fields tampered with (which both happened), it would mean a foreign power would have wholesale access to US secrets.
Another downside is simple -- heterogeneous environments make life easier for the blackhats. If everything used the same architecture, it means that a low level bug that can get code executed in ring 0 (to use Intel's terms) would affect everything from the embedded device, all the way to the supercomputers. Having different architectures means that damage due to a bug similar to the F0 0F bug of yore would be limited and containable.
Re:What, exactly, could they do in silicon? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just from the top of my head:
They could include device/code authentication on-chip --> no more anonymity + only run approved, signed software
If hardlinked to specific NIC --> govt owns your device, no more privacy.
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
As the summary surmises, a unified architecture could make it easier to build in a common backdoor for spying.
Given the sheer amount of hacking originating in China, I would think the last thing they'd want to do is apply a homogeneous solution to critical systems. It seems to me like that's just an invitation to hackers world-wide to exploit the shit out of it.
Maybe they think they're hack-proof or something.
Re:bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
There are only two differences between communism and capitalism:
1. which small group gets to make the decisions
2. which small group (same as in #1) is controlling the surveillance.
In communism, it's government/political leaders. In capitalism, it is the upper corporate echelon.
In the extreme case, when this "upper corporate echelon" gets powerful enough to pass laws, and challenge the elected government, they effectively become a part of the country's political leadership, and thus we are back to communism.
Re:Overkill? (Score:5, Insightful)
Politics (and spying) aside, this is probably not unlike their past effort to create a new Audio Video compression Standard. I'm sure the Chinese look at the Arm ISA situation and see wow, you really do have to get an Arm license if you want to make a smart phone. This seems similar to the BluRay MPEG/H.264 situation and their move with AVS. They've got a lot of smart folks in China and want to spur development. In the process, the want to see if they can give their local companies an economic advantage (reduced licensing fees for manufactured products for domestic consumption).
If this takes off in China (a big market), then instead of chinese companies paying foreign companies a licensing fee for products (net outflow of money), the foreign companies that want to make a product for consumption in the chinese market will probably have to pay the Chinese licensing fees for this. That way money for new development gets to stay in China benefiting their economy more than others. Why wouldn't they want to do this?
Of course if it makes it easier to spy on folks, so much the better (homogenous platforms make that easier), but I don't think that's the main motivation. As with most things in China today, the motivation is national economic self-interest.
fearmongering (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting how most comments wank on about fears of backdoors.
How stupid do you think the chinese are? A hardware backdoor in every device means that if you lose control of it even once, your entire infrastructure belongs to whoever you lost it to. I don't think anyone would take that risk for a bit of spying, not if you already have 100 better ways of spying.
What is so unlikely about the assumption that it really is in order to become independent of the west? That's a biggy right there. There's an elephant in the room, you know? The chinese are fast becoming one of the most important players on the world stage and they can't have something as important as chip design rest with a country (USA) that might turn hostile at the next unpredictable election.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:4, Insightful)
What are you talking about? There are literally dozens (maybe hundreds) of different types of screws [wikipedia.org] alone, engineered vastly different from one another to be best at their application. Wood screws are much different from sheet metal screws which are much different from concrete screws, phillips-head versus flat-head versus torx versus proprietary heads...
Everything from the length of the screw, the spacing of the threading, whether it's self-tapping or not...they're all engineered to be best at a particular application. Once you extend the set to include fasteners of any type, there are probably a million different types, be it mechanical, chemical, magnetic...
Try drilling a flat-head sheet metal screw into concrete. That's pretty much the same result you'll have trying to shove a one-size-fits-all CPU into every embedded computer system in the nation.
Just money not surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
... a unified architecture could make it easier to build in a common backdoor for spying ...
I doubt its over surveillance, such a backdoor will be found. The real motivation is most likely economic, simply not wanting to buy an expensive part from the west. It may even become a part they could export. Do consumers really care, or even know, what CPU is inside some electronic appliance/device?
Re:bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
What killed the USSR was that few people wanted to be productive when their efforts would merely enrich the unproductive. Central planning certainly helped, but if people had been willing to work hard for no benefit the USSR might still be around today.
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that somebody looking to build bugs would be focusing on a mechanism a trifle higher-level: whatever 'TPM-but-don't-call-it-a-TPM-because-NIH-is-serious-business' standard they are plugging away at would be one logical place to look. Any 'National Operating System' type initiative would also be worth a look(though, realistically, retail spying on end user devices is kind of a pain in the ass, and vulnerable to discovery by hacker types, and you can just bug the telcos and ISPs instead, CALEA-or-nastier style, with much less fuss).
I'd be much more inclined to suspect some combination of quasi-mercantalist desire to avoid paying license fees to western tech outfits(and provide a convenient 'hook' by which foreign outfits who wish to score Chinese contracts can be forced to collaborate with whoever produces the blessed ISA) and a desire to (try) and prevent their government infrastructure being riddled with spots of code rotting on legacy architectures because some contractor who hasn't been in business in a decade had experience with it...
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
the spying and censorship is purely for the purpose of keeping The Party in power, whatever the cost to the people.
You just described the domestic policies of the top 8 economic powers of the world. Oppression = good business. Also, it strikes me as amusing that the Chinese have erected their great firewall and surveillance technology by copying already-existing technology from the United States. Now that the Chinese are ramping up their industrial espionage and surveillance ... perhaps in response to seeing what happened to Iran with Stuxnet ... it's no surprise they're looking to harden their infrastructure.
We're trying to do it here as well; But only for certain businesses and government entities. Private citizens are still left to hang.
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if I had to define Chinese current ideology in as few words as possible, I think "national socialist" (yes, Nazi) would be closest. They're not rabid about racial superiority theories like Hitler was, and nowhere near as bloodthirsty or warmongering, but if you look at their internal policies themselves, they are remarkably similar in spirit.
Regulated capitalist economy with protectionist measures for big business, who in turn work in the interests of the state and not just themselves? check. Interests of the state over those of individual? check. Conservative attitude towards morality? check. A single artificially defined "race" that is promoted over others? check.