I think we’d consider it absolutely nuts in the US if anybody on our side suggested using Loongsons in government computers. So, this seems pretty reasonable to me.
Absolutely, and IMO the EU should be developing our own semiconductors.
It seems completely unreasonable to me that one pillar of modern society has to be bought from USA or China and doesn't have a locally sourced alternative...
I’d definitely consider it being manufactured in the EU (given the privacy laws and generally responsible nature of some of the governments around this sort of stuff) to be a perk. I don’t really think the US government is spying on us through our “management engines” and that kind of stuff, but it would be a nice perk, to be 100% certain.
I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner. What can you expect the response to be from things like ME?
If we can ban tiktok with a straight face they reasonably could ban all US made processors under the secure but with anti competitive cherry logic.
They already banned Facebook with a straight face a long time ago. And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company.
The US is hardly the aggressor on this one. They’ve simply been taking advantage of American greed for several decades and it’s finally catching up to them.
> And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company.
Your information is out of date. This has been progressively phased out over the last 30 years, and is no longer required in most industries. Just to give you an example, Tesla fully owns its operations in China.
I think it’s not a facebook ban per se but more like set of regulations (like no nsfw content and so on) that you need to meet to operate a business in the country. Facebook couldn’t care to meet those rules so they aren’t allowed to operate. Apple, Tesla and thousands other american businesses can still operate.
> They already banned Facebook with a straight face a long time ago
Zuckerberg himself said in his 2019 speech that they don't operate in China because "we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there." American tech companies absolutely can operate in China if they agree to abide by local censorship rules (like Bing is doing for China, like Google was going to do with Dragonfly, or like YouTube is doing for India). Facebook also has a substantial ad business in China [1]
> And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company.
> A large majority of new foreign investments in China are WFOEs [wholly foreign owned enterprises], rather than JVs. As Chinese legal entities, WFOEs experience greater independence than ROs, are allowed exclusive control over carrying out business activities while abiding by Chinese law and are granted intellectual and technological rights.
> WFOE refers to a limited liability company that is 100% invested, owned by foreign investors, and independently operated. Almost 60% of foreign-owned companies are WFOEs, making it the most adopted business type. Famous multinational companies such as Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and General Electric are all examples of WFOEs.
[1] > Facebook sells more than $5 billion a year worth of ad space to Chinese businesses and government agencies looking to promote their messages abroad, analysts estimate. That makes China Facebook's biggest country for revenue after the United States, which delivered $24.1 billion in advertising sales in 2018 (https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/07/facebook-makes-a-new-ad-...)
No, not about TPC-C. Hardware firms neither. The last hurrah for it was the fight between Itanium and PowerPC and then everybody stopped caring. It devolved into a benchmark where you'd get another % performance for every cache miss you saved from the SCSI / block IO request stack. It was totally IOPs bound, so they loaded up these huge machines with literally tens of thousands of hard disks that cost millions to run, and come out with some number that really wasn't very relevant. Actually I heard toward the end even the smaller 4 socket machines were driving tens of thousands of HDDs, so who knows what the 16/32 socket ones required.
I think PCI attached NAND promised to (and did) vastly reduce the cost of the hardware, because the test is pretty well IOPs-bound, but they were still very expensive, and interest had already been waning, so it didn't turn that around.
When facing an advanced adversary such as China, embargoes can backfire badly.
Short term, you may annoy them for while, but you better use that time wisely, long term, your embargo may be the forcing function that makes them even more advanced.
Granted, there may not be other politically palatable options available, but it's nonetheless risky.
The Loongsons or Kirins may be not a huge threat now, but think of Japan in the 20th century, where it turned from barely competent, almost rural country to a tech powerhouse in a few decades.
I read this tit for tat behavior as proof that the US embargoes may end up just making their own companies less competitive.
Japan eventually ran into structural limits and growth has been stalled for many years. Out of the 100 largest companies in the world, only a couple are Japanese. The country is still doing well enough but has lost the ability to produce disruptive innovations.
Expect the same thing to happen to China. If they can avoid another violent revolution, that is.
Why does it matter to have x number of companies in top 100 or something? People repeat the same lines for Europe too but both in Japan and EU people live longer, healthier lives and the life quality in general isn’t any lower than the US or China.
What if giant corporations isn’t the metric to measure success?
>The Loongsons or Kirins may be not a huge threat now,
Anyone who thinks CPUs allegedly on par with 10th gen Intel (or even a 14600K?!) and practical implementations of 7nm nodes are not huge threats is, sincerely, fucking delusional.
And assuming the claims are hot air and they're more on par with 6th gen Intel or thereabouts, anyone who thinks that's not a huge threat is, sincerely, still fucking delusional.
I think a lot of people, including those who really should know better, aren't realizing just how much processing horsepower even 6th gen Intel really has.
Of course, if those people also don't consider China a hostile in the first place, then I will grant their logic would make sense.
So what are the alternatives? Based on current information it seems that there are no domestic product in China that are comparable to these mainstream CPUs.
Well, the hardware, yes. But you are expected to compile your own software... Windows doesn't exist on Longsoon (AFAIK), and no notable distro have ready made image, nor package repository for this arch (not in the west at least. Are there such in China?). You can make it work with not a lot of effort of course, but I wonder if this is really what government folks do in their lunch break.
Office computers do not need high end CPUs. In fact, I know that several places have so old computers (with Intel chips) that they are probably slower than modern day Chinese processors.
I was sort of expecting at least one RISC V CPU to be on the list, but I guess we're still several years out from competing w/ Intel or ARM designs. And there's significant investment in MIPS toolchains, so maybe RV64 isn't quite ready for prime time in China?
It needs to be fabricated by TSMC. Domestic fabrication capabilities haven't caught up yet and are currently at the same level as Taiwan, SK, and the US around 2014.
From observation of the Chinese government, I'm pretty sure they already have an alternative to these Intel CPUs. They're just creating the legal framework to require their use.
This will boost more CPU designed and produced in China and probably will be good for consumers in general. I noted there're Longsoon MIPS based, many ARM vendors from china and I remember there's also an AMD based x86 cpu.
Readit News
It seems completely unreasonable to me that one pillar of modern society has to be bought from USA or China and doesn't have a locally sourced alternative...
The US is hardly the aggressor on this one. They’ve simply been taking advantage of American greed for several decades and it’s finally catching up to them.
Your information is out of date. This has been progressively phased out over the last 30 years, and is no longer required in most industries. Just to give you an example, Tesla fully owns its operations in China.
Zuckerberg himself said in his 2019 speech that they don't operate in China because "we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there." American tech companies absolutely can operate in China if they agree to abide by local censorship rules (like Bing is doing for China, like Google was going to do with Dragonfly, or like YouTube is doing for India). Facebook also has a substantial ad business in China [1]
> And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company.
According to the Department of Commerce (https://www.export.gov/apex/article2?id=China-Establishing-a...),
> A large majority of new foreign investments in China are WFOEs [wholly foreign owned enterprises], rather than JVs. As Chinese legal entities, WFOEs experience greater independence than ROs, are allowed exclusive control over carrying out business activities while abiding by Chinese law and are granted intellectual and technological rights.
Also (https://arc-group.com/china-company-setup/):
> WFOE refers to a limited liability company that is 100% invested, owned by foreign investors, and independently operated. Almost 60% of foreign-owned companies are WFOEs, making it the most adopted business type. Famous multinational companies such as Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and General Electric are all examples of WFOEs.
[1] > Facebook sells more than $5 billion a year worth of ad space to Chinese businesses and government agencies looking to promote their messages abroad, analysts estimate. That makes China Facebook's biggest country for revenue after the United States, which delivered $24.1 billion in advertising sales in 2018 (https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/07/facebook-makes-a-new-ad-...)
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805362
China is also beating the living daylights out of everyone else on TPC benchmarks. It seems like western software firms don't care anymore.
https://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results5.asp?print=fal...
https://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results5.asp?resu...
https://m.slashdot.org/story/361786
I think PCI attached NAND promised to (and did) vastly reduce the cost of the hardware, because the test is pretty well IOPs-bound, but they were still very expensive, and interest had already been waning, so it didn't turn that around.
Short term, you may annoy them for while, but you better use that time wisely, long term, your embargo may be the forcing function that makes them even more advanced.
Granted, there may not be other politically palatable options available, but it's nonetheless risky.
The Loongsons or Kirins may be not a huge threat now, but think of Japan in the 20th century, where it turned from barely competent, almost rural country to a tech powerhouse in a few decades.
I read this tit for tat behavior as proof that the US embargoes may end up just making their own companies less competitive.
Expect the same thing to happen to China. If they can avoid another violent revolution, that is.
What if giant corporations isn’t the metric to measure success?
Anyone who thinks CPUs allegedly on par with 10th gen Intel (or even a 14600K?!) and practical implementations of 7nm nodes are not huge threats is, sincerely, fucking delusional.
And assuming the claims are hot air and they're more on par with 6th gen Intel or thereabouts, anyone who thinks that's not a huge threat is, sincerely, still fucking delusional.
I think a lot of people, including those who really should know better, aren't realizing just how much processing horsepower even 6th gen Intel really has.
Of course, if those people also don't consider China a hostile in the first place, then I will grant their logic would make sense.
That's pretty good, especially for office work.
More players more competition, pick your poison.
Maybe I'm just too negative?
Pinduoduo got banned by Android as malware (in the US their app is Temu). As far as I know that is exceedingly rare
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