US Blocks Intel From Selling Xeon Chips To Chinese Supercomputer Projects 229
itwbennett writes: U.S. government agencies have stopped Intel from selling microprocessors for China's supercomputers, apparently reflecting concern about their use in nuclear tests. In February, four supercomputing institutions in China were placed on a U.S. government list that effectively bans them from receiving certain U.S. exports. The institutions were involved in building Tianhe-2 and Tianhe-1A, both of which have allegedly been used for 'nuclear explosive activities,' according to a notice (PDF) posted by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Intel has been selling its Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputers for years, so the ban represents a blow to its business.
Hello? The 21st Century Calling (Score:5, Funny)
So China is somehow incapable of buying the chips through a 3rd party? Maybe we could sell the Department of Commerce to China...nice regulatory agency, cheap, bit of wear around the edges and maybe a bit dated but it would fit well within China's Stupidity Index for Chinese What are Involved in Security against...errr...for the People.
Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling (Score:5, Funny)
You mean like Lenovo?
Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly.
"You aren't allowed to sell Xeon parts to but you are still allowed to ship millions of them to Lenovo. And if a couple pallets of CPUs fall off the back of the 747... well, whatyagonnado?"
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Lenovo still has to abide by US commerce regulations if it wants to sell its products in the US. (Which is currently its most lucrative way to stay in existence.) Frankly, I doubt Lenovo even has a license to buy Xeon chips. What I don't get is what is stopping a European export company from buying the computers in small numbers, and shipping it over to an Eastern European company that does no business in the US, and have them send the chips to China?
And why is this even an irritant to China. There is n
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... There is no time savings from a computation unique to a Xeon chip, that cannot be replicated by a supercomputer cluster with software higher precision emulation. Its just more work and higher energy consumption costs.
Actually, for performance-per-watt arm64 is the winner [techradar.com].
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Frankly, I doubt Lenovo even has a license to buy Xeon chips.
What kind of chips do you think they put in thier servers and workstations, Doritos?
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You mean like Lenovo?
No, he means eBay.
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If China can acquire the parts illegally somehow, they can of course use them. Export control laws theoretically prevent that, but ...
In terms of all the posts saying China already builds these systems at Foxconn, they're not entirely correct. China builds the motherboards and the systems, but the processors are, in the case of high end machines, often populated elsewhere. At this moment I can't say for certain, but in the past we've had moments where we could not populate them in China and had to have US f
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Or, they could just make their own processors. I believe they have the IP to do so through various acquisitions. And x86 isn't exactly the best instruction set out there efficiency-wise, so they might end up with something cheaper to run (definitely cheaper to build) and better.
Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure the Chinese Gov't would be more than happy to have the US Gov't check the serial numbers on those Xeon chips to tell were the source is. Obviously not. As long as the chips are allowed to be exported to China for general business use I don't see any way for the US to control it. At best whatever quasi Gov't agency in China has to buy through a 3rd party and falsify some paperwork
It's not like China doesn't have FABs and engineers that could make a similar CPU. What Intel fears the most is this will kickstart some national pride that's going to end with gov't funded R&D to make high end CPUs and GPUs.
Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling (Score:5, Informative)
It's not like China doesn't have FABs and engineers that could make a similar CPU. What Intel fears the most is this will kickstart some national pride that's going to end with gov't funded R&D to make high end CPUs and GPUs.
You are wrong. The Chinese do not have the FABs. In fact no one else but Intel has FABs at that node. Everyone else is like 2 years behind and the Chinese FABs are like 6 years behind. There are export restrictions on advanced lithography equipment and the only litho manufacturers are in the US, Europe and Japan. Namely Ultratech, ASML, Canon and Nikon.
Their chip design is over a decade behind the west. Just look at Longsoon or the licensed ARM processors companies like Mediatek manufacture.
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You're also under the mistaken impression that the Chinese can't just steal the technological details from US fab plants, and then make an acceptable copy purely for their military research division.
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It is non-trivial to reverse engineer advanced lithography equipment. This equipment is sold in small numbers and is highly controlled. Without the tools they cannot manufacture a damned thing.
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Unfortunately it is quite common to see people underestimate how chip manufacturing works. Last time Apple said they would just switch semiconductor manufacturers, even despite having their own chip design team, it took them 2-3 years. Just to port the design to a different factory. Let alone design and manufacture the chip manufacturing tools, R&D the semiconductor process, the chip design tools, the chip design, ad nauseum.
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I'm thinking the the US takes its commercial computer security so casually, the Chinese get a head start by hacking the repository with all the details involved with the fab plant. At this point, China has the engineers and materials scientists capable of reverse manufacturing critical equipment, and can buy previous generation tools from European companies.
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It is not that easy. Even if China threw its entire financial and manned weight at the problem it would take them 10-15 years to catch up and that's assuming they did not slip up along the way. There's just too many things they don't know how to do. Those "Europeans" are the Dutch which are a member of NATO. They won't export advanced litho tools to China either. Nor will the Japanese.
What the Chinese will get is like the 65 nm tools they have. Four processes behind i.e. 6 year old tools.
Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling (Score:4, Informative)
Well they are. The design is made in the USA or Israel and the manufacturing is done in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Israel, etc. The list of sites is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
Costa Rica is where Intel does wire bonding and puts the metal head spreader on the chip. Wire bonding is labor intensive so cheap labor is important to make it cost effective. It is not where they manufacture the chip. Malaysia is where AMD does wire bonding and attaches the metal heat spreader.
Intel and AMD usually say 'diffused in XXX' which is the hard and export restricted bit, and 'assembled in YYY' which is hand labor intensive non-export restricted bit.
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Wrong the Intel chip fabs are mostly located in located in the US (8 of them formerly 9) along with 1 in Ireland, 1 in China and another 1 Israel. What the US thinks they are going to do banning their export from the American fabs is going to do when they could just ship them from the ones in Israel Ireland and the local one in China is beyond me.
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Intel uses 14 nm. SMIC is full of shit. They mostly steal their process from TSMC and TSMC has been doing poorly of late.
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Illegal for US companies, or for China? I suspect the former. Then wouldn't 'China' be able to shop in Canada or Germany or Russia? Buying it through the channel? Heck buy it from the million PC makers and OEMs who already buy PCs for probably 85% of the World's PCs and 75% of the World's servers.
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If a product contains controlled technology, it cannot legally be sold directly, or indirectly to the blockaded country. Any business which doesn't obey that is in violation of federal law and gets in big trouble. This isn't new, it's been going on for a long time.
Is this going to really stop China for building a few boutique supercomputers? No, they'll get the chips they need, this will just slow them down. The real nuisance will be in lost business for China's MFG companies which could take on business th
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yes but intel cant know where every chip they make goes without putting a gps in every cpu the ship so buying through a third foreign party could very well work and due to first sale doctrine intel and by extension the us gov has no controll over where they go.
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If you are an American citizen and do business in america, you cannot sell to a supplier who you know or have reason to believe is going to export controlled technology elsewhere. You are expected to ask, to inform them of the laws and listen for the answer. This was the training most of us receive on the subject.
Now what stops someone in say, Germany, from bald-face lying about it? I don't know, but I have reason to believe that such transactions are monitored.
As I said elsewhere, China will have no troubl
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If they're banned from certain US technology and for purpose, then any route around that through any 3rd party would be illegal.
I don't understand how this could work. Would Intel have to access all CRM data for every 3rd party vendor they sell Xeon chips to? I mean if Intel sells a Xeon chip to Sweden's version of Best Buy, and China buys them from that store, how would the US government or even Intel themselves know about it?
Is Intel really expected to track every chip they sell all the way to the computer it is finally installed on, and then track every time that computer is shipped to a new location?
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Why not [tomshardware.com]?
In AMT 7.0, Intel makes it possible to use a 3G cellular signal to send that remote kill command, greatly improving your chances of deactivating a stolen computer before it gives up any sensitive information. Administrators can use similar technology to reactivate the computer once it is recovered.
Re:Hello? The 21st Century Calling (Score:5, Interesting)
Aaand... China cares about that why?
"Yes, we'd like to order 33,000 ThinkStation P700s, please? Yes, two E5-2697's, please. No, no OS. No memory either. Also no storage. Video card... hold on, let me ask our chief res... er... office manager... Okay, yes, how many Tesla K80's can you fit in one of those? Let's go with that, then. Do you take UnionPay? No? Hmm, gold bullion? Wow, rough checkout process here! Paypal? Great! Oh, can I get a tracking number when you ship it? Thanks."
Are you somehow incapable of understanding that you can't magically stop someone from getting milk while continuing to sell them live cows?
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Are you somehow incapable of understanding how export control laws work? If they're banned from certain US technology and for purpose, then any route around that through any 3rd party would be illegal. Are you somehow incapable of understanding that you can't magically stop someone from getting milk while continuing to sell them live cows?
Well, it's probably not even illegal. I imagine the entire thing is some government department following the ethics of the regulations and since the law says these chips can't be exported for certain purposes and some other department said these groups were working on those purposes, they put out something saying these chips can't be sold to those groups. Can those groups probably get their chips from someplace else, perhaps even legally? Most likely. Do the people that told Intel care? Probably not. That t
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That's not how the encryption export laws work.
Soon this will be impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
Someday soon, the US will be unable to bully people into this kind of bullshit. Soon enough, it will make more sense economically to say "Fuck US" and pull out. This can't happen soon enough.
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Won't someone please think of the poor Chinese nuclear weapons program?
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Both US designed as well. I know there are open cores but they aren't the high end chips.
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Looked at the TOP 500 recently?
ShenWei SW1600
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1.1 GHz. Two integer and two floating point pipelines. 7-stage, 40-bit physical address. 8 KB L1 cache, 96 KB L2 cache. These are worse specs than those of a 32-bit AMD Athlon processor from 1999.
But hey it has 16 cores. They are manufacturing it at 65 nm after all. Intel uses 14 nm right now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6... [wikipedia.org]
That's four manufacturing process generations behind what Intel uses. It you assume Moore's Law happens every 18 months this would be like using a six year processor even if they had bl
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Yes, it is still no match, but you are confusing specs with design. If one looks at the values from the TOP 500, it doesn't seem to perform bad. In the LINPACK benchmark it comes much closer to the theoretical value than other systems. To me, this is a sign of a very good design. The processor is said to be inspired by alpha. My point is: China is already building supercomputers using their own processors... They are catching up.
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It has dual FP units. So what. Blue Gene also looks good FP wise and the design is mostly crap.
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Yes, but the point here is, they don't need our help to build "more efficient" supercomputers. If you design your chips to go wide and slow, you can build an efficient architecture on older process nodes. These are wide vector machines just like Intel is shipping; you can determine this from the claimed 140.8 GFLOPs:
1.1 Billion clocks * 2 FPU vector units * 16 cores * 4 instructions/vector unit = 140.8 GFLOPS. Not as wide as the 512-bit vector units in the latest Knights Landing, but really not that far
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I guess you missed the fact that the architecture of choice for the majority of the worlds computers is ARM.
Fast chips for nuclear simulations? Yep, Intel have the edge there ..... I guess. I'm somewhat surprised that stuff isn't better run on GPUs to be honest, but whatever. OK, so their simulations take 20% longer to run. BFD?
for whom Slashdot is not nerd discussion site (Score:2)
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China overrunning Japan is a laugh. It was the other way around, and outside of a couple tiny islands China has never claimed any land Japan claims and has never invaded Japan in all history (unless you count the Mongols as Chinese).
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It's not 1937 any more.
China's aggression is limited by what they think they can get away with.
So, were are they assembled or fabed? (Score:2)
Last I checked, Intel had a fabrication plant and an assembly plant in China. Perhaps they don't actually assemble or fabricate Xeons there, but way to not think things all the way through there Intel.
In other news, AMD stock goes through the roof.
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Pretty sure that the newest 'shrinks' are done in the USA and when a process becomes mainstream they offshore the production.
Re:So, were are they assembled or fabed? (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly right - Intel's development fab is in Hillsboro, Oregon. They get the fab process working there, and then document the hell out of it and reproduce that billion+ dollar facility in their production fabs around the world - Costa Rica, Philippines, Malaysia, etc. Then they tear out the inside of the development fab and start over for the next generation. Periodically they need a bigger building footprint, so they build another dev fab next door and assign the previous dev fab to be a production fab at that node for products until they're done with it.
That would be what this campus [google.com] does.
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Exactly right - Intel's development fab is in Hillsboro, Oregon. They get the fab process working there, and then document the hell out of it and reproduce that billion+ dollar facility in their production fabs around the world - Costa Rica, Philippines, Malaysia, etc. Then they tear out the inside of the development fab and start over for the next generation. Periodically they need a bigger building footprint, so they build another dev fab next door and assign the previous dev fab to be a production fab at that node for products until they're done with it.
That would be what this campus [google.com] does.
If you drag the map upwards a couple of times, you can see my house.
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Quick point of clarification: there are no Intel fabs in any of those countries. All of Intel's leading-edge fabs are located in the US and Israel. There is a single fab in China, Fab 68, but it's purposely well behind the rest (currently at 65nm).
Costa Rica, Philippines, and Malaysia are all "Assembly Test" locations where finished wafers are sent for testing, packaging, and assembly in
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In other news, AMD stock goes through the roof.
You're acting like China won't still be able to get their hands on a stack of Xeons any time they want to with Lenovo and Foxconn both sitting inside their borders. Plus, AMD can't deliver anything close to Xeon performance, much less at the same power rating. Nobody wants to dump 10MW into a computer room and then evacuate that heat if they can do the same job in 6MW with 2.5x the performance*.
Looking at this [cpubenchmark.net] really should shed some light on where high-end computing sits right now - AMD isn't even in the
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They can but it will be a lot more expensive and you can bet getting the tens or hundreds of thousands of chips they need for a supercomputer WILL be noticeable.
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Did you really just ignore the part where I said that if you're building a super computer that is meant to simulate nuclear weapon detonation, you don't give a shit about the cost of the individual CPUs?
When the supercomputers in question are designed for Xeon already (they are) you don't up and switch to POWER or SPARC.
And I compared Intel's top performant part to AMD's top performant part based on that benchmark. If AMD has something that even gets close to a Xeon E5 V3 within the same power dissipation,
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That plant cannot use the latest manufacturing process. It is used to manufacture chipsets and crap like that.
No they don't fab Xeons there (Score:2)
The Chinese fab is a 65nm fab, which is for older stuff. All their 22nm fabs are in the US and Israel.
Actions have consequences. (Score:4, Funny)
"China: Okay, we'll just go back to actual above-ground nuclear testing"
"US: But you signed a test ban!"
"China: Come and stop us."
This seriously cannot end well. China already has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, this goes so far beyond the scale of our pissing contest with Iran as to make it almost laughable (if it didn't potentially involve the world ending in a nuclear holocaust).
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They're blocking Xeon chips, not Opteron chips. So, maybe some single-threaded programs the Chinese are running will suffer for it, but that's about all.
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Came here to say this.
List of Chinese nuclear tests [wikipedia.org]
Furthermore, is denying China access to certain Intel CPUs that much of a roadblock? They can buy elsewhere or even make their own. Maybe even make their own clones of these very Intel chips.
This pissing match is stupid on a Cuba-esque level.
Re:Actions have consequences. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually China's nuclear arsenal is a fraction of the US and Russian arsenals. It's about the same size as France's (250 - 300 warheads) but China doesn't have a deployable ballistic missile submarine fleet to provide the sine qua non of the Big Boys, a guaranteed second-strike retaliatory capability. They're working on building that capability but it's not operational at the moment.
China has signed but not yet ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) but its last shot was in 1996 after 45 tests in total. The only other nation in the Big Five who has not ratified the CTBT is the US who stopped testing in 1992 after firing off over 1000 devices.
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There won't be a war over this. There have been situations must worst involving China and China's most hated country resulted in nothing (citation needed? Here it is:http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/25/us-japan-china-idUSBREA4O01920140525)
Yet more proof the legislators are clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
Its very depressing that the democratic process can fail badly enough to not only put but keep clearly incompetent judges and politicians in complete control of legislating on stuff like this that they clearly don't understand.
There needs to be an active mechanism in government that weeds incompetence and ignorance out of the system.
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Voting alone cleariy doesn't work since if it did, we wouldn't already be in this mess.
Apart from the fact that its not an ongoing process or fine-grained enough, its also before-the-fact in that once politicians get past it, they can and do repeatedly fail with impunity.
Meanwhile .... (Score:2)
Huh.,.wait... (Score:2)
I think all of the chips I've bought from Intel have been made in Malaysia or China. This is probably one of those, hey the chips are fabricated in China. But don't you dare sell the units to them. So China just operates a midnight shift, presses their own, and America loses out on revenue.
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I think all of the chips I've bought from Intel have been made in Malaysia or China.
Intel is actually substantially bizarre in their practices. The chips themselves are made in the US billion dollar fabs. Then very carefully packed into shipping containers and shipped to Malaysia, where they are removed from the shipping containers and inserted into the production packages. And then shipped to China and Taiwan to be put on boards (and small amounts back to the US to be sold retail by NewEgg).
Why the chip packaging step isn't so completely automated that it can be done for peanuts on sit
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Chinese workers are still cheaper than to develop & implement a packaging robot? I find it hard to believe, but that's probably the case.
Well, China IS a little bit scary. (Score:3)
Nothing on the magnitude of North Korea or Iran. Not even on the same order as Russia. But it's clear that China is not in the global market for altrustic purposes. They're an economic superpower, and they're going defend that. They're unlike to attack the US, though. But mostly beause they sell most of their products to us, not for any other reason. If I were in the Chinese government, I'd be scared of North Korea and want to maintain a defense.
So the US DoD and DoC have to weigh the slight risk of China deciding some day to come in and take over the US against the more immediate benefits of China drawing NK's attention away from us and being part of the general defense against NK's batshit craziness.
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Nothing on the magnitude of North Korea or Iran. Not even on the same order as Russia. But it's clear that China is not in the global market for altrustic purposes. They're an economic superpower, and they're going defend that. They're unlike to attack the US, though. But mostly beause they sell most of their products to us, not for any other reason. If I were in the Chinese government, I'd be scared of North Korea and want to maintain a defense.
So the US DoD and DoC have to weigh the slight risk of China deciding some day to come in and take over the US against the more immediate benefits of China drawing NK's attention away from us and being part of the general defense against NK's batshit craziness.
Yes, if I were China I would be heavily investing in tactical nukes to deal with North Korea in the event of serious invasion. They would be a backup plan, but a backup plan I'd want to have.
I would also invest in conventional preparedness for it. Fundamentally you need to maintain air superiority, have good surveillance, and have a whole lot of cluster bombs. For political reasons you'd want some smart bombs too, but mostly you'd want cluster bombs.
Third, you'd be ready for a full propaganda war undermi
Applies to all subsidiaries of Intel? (Score:2)
The logic seems to be, "we got to do something", "this is stupid", "stupid or not it is something that can be done" "so let us do the stupid thing"
In other news... (Score:2)
Intel just received a flood of orders from China. Thousands of people have each ordered one Xeon processor each.
Fine (Score:2)
Like telling smugglers the can't use $100 bills (Score:2)
History repeats itself (Score:2)
This is how Wipro got started, by building PDP-11 clones because of export bans. The Soviets also got around export restrictions as well. [wikipedia.org] It's never helped prohibit a adversary from getting what they want even when they have to build it themselves and at great cost. [wikipedia.org]
I welcome our new Chinese chip-fabbing overlords (Score:2)
Everybody seems to be saying: "Oh noes, this is soooo bad! It's gonna make China get up off its ass and finally give Intel some actual competition!!!"
And here I am, thinking that we all stand to benefit if Intel got some actual competition.
Uhhh... guyys... (Score:2)
So let's say I ban the highest Xeons.
Can't they just buy more middle-tier Xeons?
Furthermore, why the hell would they need a bleeding-edge super computer to accomplish something we did without any super computers in the 40's? A single iPhone has more power than the ENIAC... a TI-83 does too.
Lastly, you don't need modern nukes to become a part of the alliance of nuclear deterrent. You just need nukes that work.
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They wouldn't even bother with the clustering of Lenovo stuff - they'd just unsocket the CPU and put it into the supercomputer nodes, and then give back the CPU-less server to Lenovo by way of "RMA" or something else, hiding the fact that there is no CPU in it when they get it back. Then, Lenovo refurbishes it (sockets another CPU) and sells it again at a slight discount.
Like the US Department of Commerce would have any clue if that was happening or not.
Re:Awesome job guys! (Score:5, Informative)
If (yeah, I know) the Chinese are developing nuclear bombs, this will hold them up for maybe a couple of years.
China has been a declared nuclear weapons state since 1964.
They are doing what we are doing now - modeling how the weapons work because many of us agreed not to physically test them any more over twenty years ago.
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If I recall, as plutonium ages, helium builds up in the crystal lattice. This might have a performance impact on the weapon yield. I'm not sure if the cores are ever smelted back down and reformed to deal with this problem; if it's even a problem in fact. Haven't a clue. Other than old stockpile simulation testing, I'm not sure what else could be the point in all this.
Smelting Plutonium sounds like one of life's more complex engineering problems.
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True, I don't think the yield is the concern, I think the worry is that the bomb will fail to detonate. Since the Chinese have nuclear power stations that shouldn't matter as they can replace the plutonium with new plutonium from time to time I would have thought.
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It's not just that. The Chinese have been working on miniaturization of their nuclear warheads so can they make them road mobile and submarine launched. They also are working on stealth aircraft, advanced radar, and the like. So you can bet they could use the processing power.
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I'm surprised the FTC allowed it in the first place.
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Intel fabrication plants are mostly in the US [wikipedia.org], with one in Israel, one in Ireland, and one in China (apparently a 65nm process plant, so definitely not their most cutting edge stuff). Yeah, surprised me too when I looked it up.
Then I thought a bit about it, and it's perhaps not so surprising. The last thing Intel wants is to lose their edge in the *process* of making those chips. Considering that it probably costs them up to $10 billion to set up a fab plant [forbes.com], labor costs probably aren't exactly the big e
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Apple assembles things in China. The actual chip manufacturing is done in Taiwan and the USA.
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IIRC Apple constructs its MacPro's in the US.
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Intel does not manufacture CPUs in East Asia. The only 'Asian' manufacturing site is in Israel.
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It's harder than you think it is.
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They don't have the machine tools, they don't have the knowledge to do advanced chip design, they can't do it. Period.
Sure they might do it with a monster project in like a decade, but by then the industry will have moved beyond the current point.
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Not 14 mm. Their claims of 28 nm are doubtful. They buy litho tools from outside and they don't have permission to buy 28 nm grade tools.
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That would require a fab in china with Intel's process & capabilities. So far that doesn't exist in China (or Korea).
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That would require a fab in china with Intel's process & capabilities. So far that doesn't exist in China.
But this ensures that it will happen sooner than it otherwise would. America will have regulated yet another industry out of existence. A decade from now, we will look back, and consider this to be just as stupid and counter-productive as the cryptography ban of the 1990s.
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The soonest way China gets SOTA computing chips is to provide the chips from US factories. (And then the Chinese build the tools to nuke said factories.) Let them develop their own competing technology. That at least gives a 10-20 year window where the US is "safe" from higher tech nukes. Handing it over to them for a profit gives zero time window.
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They can press the chips into import.
Lenovo builds servers, lenovo buys in bulk Chinese government takes what it needs from lenovos stock. Problem solved.
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Lenovo still has to follow US export laws, and Lenovo can simply be embargoed. I don't think Lenovo even produces computers with Xeon CPUs (unless they come from the outdated China fab plant).
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1945 tech nukes was plenty good enough to destroy entire cities, and China doesn't have just 2 of them but hundreds. What exactly is the point of delaying higher tech nukes?
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Why not just buy them in the US or in Canada and smuggle out? It is not like we have dogs trained to find them in luggage...
This is replay of the furor over strong encryption from the 1990ies [wikipedia.org] — yes, it is good to know, Obama Administration recognizes there are some people out there, who may want to harm us, but the ban on sales seems as useless as prohibiting export of encryption. Any organization large enough to challenge the US, is large enough to be able to get it with little effort, ban or not.
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The number of clients who buy Xeons and Xeon Phis is quite limited. It's less hard to track it down than you think.
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What's to stop China building a supercomputers in the US and doing the sims in the US?
Today's supercomputer is tomorrow's AWS for $50/month.