US stops Intel from selling Xeons to Chinese gub'ment

[Madpacket]

Guys. Just look at what's going on in the world. You're to blind to see that this is just a positioning move. Sanctions are about squeezing other nations for doing "bad things". The "bad things" in this case is all of the supposed state sanctioned hacking China has been performing against US companies and government.

This is a very mild retaliation of recent events. A stance if you will. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending where you sit) there isn't much the US can do against China as China owns a huge amount of US debt and unlike with Russia and the recent oil debacle the US really can't apply that much pressure.

This is one of those moves that appease upper management (hey we stopped the selling of super computers to hacking foreign nation who will nuke us if they get the chips) but really does nothing to prevent the espionage that both countries are actively perorming against each other.

Anytime someone is uncomfortable with the truth they bring out the conspiracy card. That's a natural defense to an uncomfortable feeling and is understandable but please do your own research before spouting off the conspiracy theory card.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Anyone remember back in the Playstation 2 days, there was worry the CPU / GPU would be used by unfriendly's in missiles. Ha!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/04/17/playstation_2_exports/

 

[aigomorla]

US: we dont want you selling processors to china.
Intel: uhhh we have fabs in china
US: just export them only... no inhouse sells.
Intel: but 90% of the motherboard companys are from china, so we cant export ES samples?
US: you guys can work it out... this is what big daddy decided.
Intel: *ceo goes bangs his head on desk*

 

[Idontcare]

US: we dont want you selling processors to china.
Intel: uhhh we have fabs in china
US: just export them only... no inhouse sells.
Intel: but 90% of the motherboard companys are from china, so we cant export ES samples?
US: you guys can work it out... this is what big daddy decided.
Intel: *ceo goes bangs his head on desk*

Need to add one more line:

US: ok, to make it up to you, here are two supercomputer contracts. The timing is purely coincidental now have we sufficiently made this all better?

 

[podspi]

Guys. Just look at what's going on in the world. You're to blind to see that this is just a positioning move. Sanctions are about squeezing other nations for doing "bad things". The "bad things" in this case is all of the supposed state sanctioned hacking China has been performing against US companies and government.

This is a very mild retaliation of recent events. A stance if you will. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending where you sit) there isn't much the US can do against China as China owns a huge amount of US debt and unlike with Russia and the recent oil debacle the US really can't apply that much pressure.

This is one of those moves that appease upper management (hey we stopped the selling of super computers to hacking foreign nation who will nuke us if they get the chips) but really does nothing to prevent the espionage that both countries are actively perorming against each other.

Anytime someone is uncomfortable with the truth they bring out the conspiracy card. That's a natural defense to an uncomfortable feeling and is understandable but please do your own research before spouting off the conspiracy theory card.

(Emphasis Added).

Everybody always says this like it means China has something over the U.S. when this is not true. Since the U.S. is a sovereign nation, China can't actually collect unless (this discussion btw ignores how bonds actually work):

1) The U.S. decides they can
or
2) China forcibly collects.

Unfortunately, we've spent a ton of their money buying guns, so good luck with #2. The best they could do is sell a ton at once, which could potentially hurt us, but it would also hurt them (a lot). (It could also help us retire debt for pennies on the dollar).

Of course, the way bonds actually work, they can't 'call in their debts' whenever they want, and the bonds give them no voting power of the USG, so really all they have is a LOT of paper and the USG's word that they will get something for it in the future.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

(Emphasis Added).

Everybody always says this like it means China has something over the U.S. when this is not true. Since the U.S. is a sovereign nation, China can't actually collect unless (this discussion btw ignores how bonds actually work):

1) The U.S. decides they can
or
2) China forcibly collects.

Unfortunately, we've spent a ton of their money buying guns, so good luck with #2. The best they could do is sell a ton at once, which could potentially hurt us, but it would also hurt them (a lot). (It could also help us retire debt for pennies on the dollar).

Of course, the way bonds actually work, they can't 'call in their debts' whenever they want, and the bonds give them no voting power of the USG, so really all they have is a LOT of paper and the USG's word that they will get something for it in the future.

If you believe the Germans had a truly democratic election in ~1932, then I can tell you I am convinced that there always is a "mass-psychology," a "herd-mentality," manipulators of propaganda, and alarmist worries born of myth. People have "political beliefs," and therefore -- all are equal, except that mine are right and yours are wrong.

Here's my belief: Belief will get you a dime for a cup of weak coffee. Common sense matters; practical reality will always bring the idealists up short from reaching their belief-driven normative view of "how things ought to be."

The defense industry is a monopsony: in simplistic terms, there's only one buyer, but many sellers. The buyer thinks it in the interest of National Security to continue feeding contracts to the beast, keeping the beast "on-line." In that context, it may well be that the industry -- here and there -- has been selling us out. We are the largest seller of last-generation armaments on the international market.

How these Xeon processors play into a National Security issue, you can add more facts and then your theories supported by the facts. But I agree with Mad_Packet on this one. It is a tit-for-tat move over recent hacking. And they have a long way to go for catching up to the NSA and the entire telecommunications industry that had been guided, nurtured, accommodated, co-opted and even loosely organized from the time in the early '50s when NSA got its charter.

As to the amount of debt the "Chi-Coms" hold. This is blown out of proportion. They may hold the largest amount compared to other countries, like Japan.

But it's only 7% of the total last time I looked.

Part of the problem in playing "king of the mountain:" Once it's been discovered that you can tap into just about any telephone in the world, those in second-place are going to start testing your defenses. So not only do we have the Chinese military cyber-division hacking US companies and testing our National Security apparatus, it was only weeks ago when it was announced that the Russians had hacked into an unsecured part of the White House information system.

But contrary to Condon's Manchurian novel and Frankenheimer's 1962 movie release, and contrary to the Cold War scares of the '50s and '60s, the Russky's and the Chi-Coms were never working together at much. There was never any coordinated "Monster Plot," as the paranoid Jim Angleton of CIA counter-intelligence tried to promote it.

So you wonder -- with $6 trillion spent on the Cold War, and as we continue to sweep up the troubling detritus of that Cold War in Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Korean Peninsula, Ukraine -- how much was spent out of panic about myth, exaggeration, or just the uncertainty that we didn't know the specifics, so we had to "believe" the worst.

Belief may actually take your dime, before you can buy a cup of coffee with it. [EDIT] To buy $600 coffee-makers, $1000 toilet seats, or a $5 civilian electronic component slightly altered to fit a MIL-spec and re-priced under contract for $75.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I'm not sure that China's status as debt-holder really affects this decision one way or the other. So long as the US remains such a large consumer of Chinese-made exports, the Chinese are dependent on us continuing to be good little consumers. We are too intertwined right now for one power to live comfortably without the other.

It remains to be seen what power all that debt-holding does give them. In the long term, it amounts to a shift in wealth (real wealth) from the United States to China, which is less a problem for the gun-toting American government and more a problem for the average American. The typical American response to foreign powers acquiring large quantities of American currency is to promote inflation through overprinting of currency, leading to the devaluation of foreign currency reserves. Such currency policies also devalue domestic currency reserves, making it harder for us to buy lurvely Intel processors and the like.

The Chinese national currency reserve is somewhere around $4 trillion, and as of late October 2014, they held 7.2% of our debt (Japan held 7.0% at the same time). Make of that what you will.

The political concern is that any power that holds that much of our currency and that much of our debt can exert subtle (and often horribly illegal) influence in our cash-ridden political system. It is not outside the realm of possibility that if the Chicoms really want to see the lifting of a particular export ban, that they could just buy the result they want. The rest could be achieved from threatening to pick up fewer US Treasuries the next time the US gub'ment has a bond issue. Money talks and bull**** walks, as goes the saying. It would take time but it is certainly something that could happen.

Intel is caught up in a game of chess with no end in sight. For their sake, hopefully they'll find plenty of other Phi buyers.

 

[Idontcare]

Personally I do not believe that our government has the wherewithal to contemplate such cogent topics as you raise, DrMrLordX.

I think their clamor to stifle the China supercom basically boils down to a government policy that was created on the basis of our NSA advising someone somewhere that if they (US politician XYZ) wants to do something about China hacking US assets then they need to start by not letting China accumulate the types of processing power that the NSA themselves are busily acquiring.

I could be wrong, but I've yet to read anything written by a politician that adequately or accurately addresses the global financial picture within which our national economy operates. And the fact they can't secure the emails that the secretary of state wrote, let alone the white house intranet, suggests this is all one big knee jerk reaction.

 

[Exophase]

They can already run Linux on their homegrown Longsoon chips which is often the base OS for their supercomputers anyway.

Is Loongson actually used in anything resembling a supercomputer? It sucked with the known release years ago, and unless they've been quietly continuing development since then (and not releasing it to the outside world anymore) it'll suck even more now.

There was hype about Godson 3C for years, going all the way back to 2010 (supposed to have 512-bit vector units) but I can't find any indication that it was ever actually released. And there was some hay made over their instructions meant for optimizing x86 translation, but IMO a lot of it was just there to cover a poor software translation solution, which is a bad sign.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Personally I do not believe that our government has the wherewithal to contemplate such cogent topics as you raise, DrMrLordX.

Among elected officials, yes. But if you look at the Fed, you'll see the same basic people (or their acolytes) cycle through the Federal Reserve and other unelected positions in or near the US gub'ment while making a long play when it comes to currency policy. People like Yellen have links going back to Allen Greenspan. He may as well still be the Fed chairman. They last from one administration to the next, no matter who wins the White House or who controls the House or Senate.

There are people in the CIA, FBI, NSA, and Pentagon/Joint Chiefs who also have a way of showing up over and over again. Those are the people in government who can see at least part of the big picture, and are also the ones that provide advice as you mentioned . . .

I think their clamor to stifle the China supercom basically boils down to a government policy that was created on the basis of our NSA advising someone somewhere that if they (US politician XYZ) wants to do something about China hacking US assets then they need to start by not letting China accumulate the types of processing power that the NSA themselves are busily acquiring.

There's probably an element of that. It remains to be seen exactly how serious anyone is about the ban. The NSA has their own game they're playing here, and judging by what our President is attempting to do with Iran, it seems unlikely that anyone is genuinely concerned about China using supercomputers to carry out nuclear yield simulations.

The interesting part comes from one influence group (in this case, NSA) doing things that step on the toes of a different influence group (The Fed?). Irritating the Chinese overmuch threatens US fiscal policy, but passivity in the face of the expansion of Chinese potence in the theatre of cryptography is something that the NSA will not abide in silence.

Intel is caught in the middle.

I could be wrong, but I've yet to read anything written by a politician that adequately or accurately addresses the global financial picture within which our national economy operates. And the fact they can't secure the emails that the secretary of state wrote, let alone the white house intranet, suggests this is all one big knee jerk reaction.

Whichever silly politicians are responsible for carrying out this ban are certainly reacting based on irrational fears. I credit the NSA for having more vision than that, even if it is myopic.

Is Loongson actually used in anything resembling a supercomputer? It sucked with the known release years ago, and unless they've been quietly continuing development since then (and not releasing it to the outside world anymore) it'll suck even more now.

To the best of my knowledge, no. There is an octo-core variant of Loongson 3B clocked at up to 1.5 ghz which should provide enough punch to feed a Tesla or Volta, I'd think. Or GCN cards. I just don't think anyone has seen fit to bother with it when available Intel processors (and their respective platforms) do the job nicely.

There was hype about Godson 3C for years, going all the way back to 2010 (supposed to have 512-bit vector units) but I can't find any indication that it was ever actually released. And there was some hay made over their instructions meant for optimizing x86 translation, but IMO a lot of it was just there to cover a poor software translation solution, which is a bad sign.

3B has the instructions intended to assist in x86 emulation. Seems like a poor-man's VT-x/AMD-v.

 

[NTMBK]

To the best of my knowledge, no. There is an octo-core variant of Loongson 3B clocked at up to 1.5 ghz which should provide enough punch to feed a Tesla or Volta, I'd think. Or GCN cards. I just don't think anyone has seen fit to bother with it when available Intel processors (and their respective platforms) do the job nicely.

You hit the nail on the head- they will still be reliant on USA designed GPUs for the computational heavy lifting. If the USG is preventing Intel from selling to them, how long until they block AMD, NVidia, and IBM?

 

[ShintaiDK]

how long until they block AMD, NVidia, and IBM?

Seems its already the case.

However its not going to stop anything or anyone.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/10/technology/security/intel-blocked-nuclear/

It seems a permit can be obtained for these 4 centers.

So perhaps the entire case ends in "we just want to be asked first before you sell to the chinese centers" and nothing else.

 

[Exophase]

To the best of my knowledge, no. There is an octo-core variant of Loongson 3B clocked at up to 1.5 ghz which should provide enough punch to feed a Tesla or Volta, I'd think. Or GCN cards. I just don't think anyone has seen fit to bother with it when available Intel processors (and their respective platforms) do the job nicely.

At that point it seems much more practical to have some small low power cores integrated into the SoC. Quad core Cortex-A57 @ 2+GHz could probably beat octo-1.5GHz Loongson 3B.

3B has the instructions intended to assist in x86 emulation. Seems like a poor-man's VT-x/AMD-v.

I didn't mean to mention that in connection with 3C. I actually thought it was part of 3A.

It's really nothing like VT-x. Just helps close some of the semantic gap between x86 and MIPS, a lot of which could have been optimized out by software (most flags generation and x87 register stack pointer, for example). The general purpose CAM used for branch target translation is a nice feature though, and would have been helpful for emulating other platforms.

 

[DrMrLordX]

You hit the nail on the head- they will still be reliant on USA designed GPUs for the computational heavy lifting. If the USG is preventing Intel from selling to them, how long until they block AMD, NVidia, and IBM?

Looks like Shintai dug up the dirt on that.

Seems its already the case.

However its not going to stop anything or anyone.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/10/technology/security/intel-blocked-nuclear/

It seems a permit can be obtained for these 4 centers.

So perhaps the entire case ends in "we just want to be asked first before you sell to the chinese centers" and nothing else.

From the article:

The agency now requires any American company to first apply for a special permit before exporting any products to these supercomputing centers.

In reality, any products powering those supercomputers "would almost certainly mean a denial," said Kevin Wolf, assistant secretary of commerce for the agency's Bureau of Industry and Security.

I read that as "ask if you want, we'll just turn you down". Thanks for linking the article, though, since it covers more than just Intel. It also lays out the financial stakes involved: nearly $50 mil in sales.

At that point it seems much more practical to have some small low power cores integrated into the SoC. Quad core Cortex-A57 @ 2+GHz could probably beat octo-1.5GHz Loongson 3B.

Right, and you could actually get even more compute power with a competent iGPU. Anyone can join the ARMy, and it may be more wise for ICT to plow its resources into ARM development. They're already fabbing Loongson 3B on a 28nm process. Not too shabby.

I didn't mean to mention that in connection with 3C. I actually thought it was part of 3A.

It probably is.

It's really nothing like VT-x. Just helps close some of the semantic gap between x86 and MIPS, a lot of which could have been optimized out by software (most flags generation and x87 register stack pointer, for example). The general purpose CAM used for branch target translation is a nice feature though, and would have been helpful for emulating other platforms.

Hmm. Apparently one of the ways in which Loongson 3 chips emulate x86 (aided by the special x86 feature) is through use of QEMU so I immediately thought of virtualization and VT-x/AMD-v. Just my take on it . . . doesn't mean I'm right. Regardless, there's no reason for them to worry about x86 anyway, at least not in supercomputer design.

 

[sm625]

There is no way the US can stop china from buying xeons. The US is a corporatist state, it is 180 degrees opposite the type of state that even would attempt such a feat.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

There is no way the US can stop china from buying xeons. The US is a corporatist state, it is 180 degrees opposite the type of state that even would attempt such a feat.

They can merely make it "harder" for such acquisitions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the earliest decade of the PC era, we were denying export of that technology to USSR. If I was right about that, there would've been some residual smuggling.

This was also the case with the sanctions on the Saddam regime. It turned the spigot off for the world's third largest oil-reserve, but Saddam trickled out some of it into a black market for oil.

I don't think any of our "visionaries" see the future as clearly as we would like. I don't think anyone has a clear picture of where globalization, NSA's long-standing technological triumph, drone technology or any of it is leading us.

A futurist named Kaplan had been an editor at Atlantic Monthly back in the '90s. He foretold several things: the demise of the nation-state; the emergence of mega-city-states; a replacement of truly "democratic" government with something he called "high-tech capitalistic feudalism;" and cyber-warfare between these mega-city-states.

Whatever part of that you find untenable, I think the nature of the warfare is materializing.

 

[Exophase]

Hmm. Apparently one of the ways in which Loongson 3 chips emulate x86 (aided by the special x86 feature) is through use of QEMU so I immediately thought of virtualization and VT-x/AMD-v. Just my take on it . . . doesn't mean I'm right. Regardless, there's no reason for them to worry about x86 anyway, at least not in supercomputer design.

While QEMU today can use hardware virtualization today (via KVM AFAIK) it also performs emulation via binary translation, which is how Godson-3 is using it. This makes it no different from any other system or user mode emulation in QEMU, it just emits more optimized instructions.

But I don't blame people for being confused about this, their publication on it straight up says this:

To support x86 emulation, Godson-3 provides hardware support for binary translation from x86 to MIPS in its GS464 core.

Which is very misleading. It makes it sound like it has the ability to decode and execute x86 instructions directly which is not the case. They goes on to showcase how beneficial it is by showing it improve on some very terrible QEMU MIPS code generation, from a version that was probably already old by the time it was published. The sad thing is that for a lot of their examples a better binary translator could probably outperform the version that used their enhanced instructions. And as far as I'm aware, support for these instructions never got upstreamed into QEMU anyway (which probably long since abandoned the code generation architecture of whatever version they modified, in favor of TCG)

I agree that there probably isn't much point for running x86 software in the first place, especially when they wouldn't have gotten good performance with Windows because that'd mean resorting to much slower system mode emulation (unless they integrated WINE into user mode emulation). Just makes it all the sadder that they added some 200 instructions for it.

 

[imported_ats]

There is no way the US can stop china from buying xeons. The US is a corporatist state, it is 180 degrees opposite the type of state that even would attempt such a feat.

They aren't trying to stop China from buying xeons, they are trying to stop these for organizations, and they can make it very very difficult. As a for instance, if say Lenovo started funneling their supply to these centers, the USG would cut off Lenovo as a whole.

 

[podspi]

It is either posturing or terrible short-sightedness.


It doesn't take anything magical to design and fab ICs. Just $$$ (resources). While China's per capita GDP is still pretty anemic, it is big enough that if the government wants to do it, they will be able to. Things like this will just encourage them to do it faster.

 

[CruciallyBad]

The effects will be more short term than long term. IBM recently gave china a license to produce POWER8 chips (up to 12 cores and 96 threads, with support for DDR3 and DDR4),

IBM is opening up details of Power Systems technology right down to chip architectures and design tools. Suzhou PowerCore of China, for example, has licensed the intellectual property (IP) for the POWER8* processor to allow it to develop and fabricate its own POWER8 chips from scratch.

Not to mention Suzhou PowerCore is a company created by Suzhou China Core just to license POWER8, which is in turn a contractor for many chinese research institutions. The POWER9 is expected to come out in 2017, and it's going to be in Summit, the fastest super computer being built. The move to ban intel chips is purely symbolic.

 

[DrMrLordX]

POWER9 is only the "base" processor in Summit, intended to handle the OS + networking/clustering overhead and schedule dispatches to the GPUs. The real grunt work will be done by a bunch of Volta cards.

 

[Intel FX Master]

Leave it to Government to frig up "The Free Market" that we never really had in the first place LOL.