Tensions with the West are putting the future of China’s Skynet at stake | Hacker News Reader

Tensions with the West are putting the future of China’s Skynet at stake

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52 pointsrumcajz21 comments

> There are other components, such as graphic processing chips used in the security cameras, that are not yet banned for sale to China, but soon may be. Most of the chips are imported from the US, which still allows them to be exported to China.

And here I thought all these components were manufactured and assembled entirely in China already. What's stopping a Chinese company from developing a better chip than Ryzen or Tegra? Not enough R&D funding?

Developing chips is a marathon. AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and company are decades ahead of everyone else due to the fact that they buy what they want and have been building them for decades.

Nothing is stopping a Chinese company from making their own GPU/CPUs (which they are)- it will just take years, if not decades, to reach feature parity. That's not even considering how much work China needs to do to be able to tap out chips at 32, 14, and 12nm

This claim seems a little dubious to me.

China seems pretty good at 'obtaining' the info they need to give them a head start, plus they're a manufacturing powerhouse with a ruthless determination to 'get stuff done'.

They also don't face commercial pressure to release stuff slowly. Sure it'll take them some time, but 'decades' seems to me to underestimate their capabilities.

High-end chips like Ryzen and Tegra are not manufactured in the People's Republic of China actually.

Do you have a source?

They are made by GlobalFoundries, which have only just started construction on a lab in China - wikipedia.

GF is likely to scrap that project since they dropped out of the node race.

SSC also put a hold on building a 7nm node fab in China.

GF has foundries in Germany and in the US, TSMC is Taiwan. Beyond that the only other fab for hire company with an advanced node is SSC and all their advanced fabs are in Korea.

The only thing that China can currently fab on a matching node are display panels.

Their IC nodes are still stuck on 28nm and even that is pushing it.

China doesn’t have any advanced fans, TSMC is in Taiwan.

> Skynet, as China’s national security network is known, had 170 million cameras last year and Beijing plans to have another 400 million units installed across the country by 2020.

Oh wow, what an unfortunate name. Did the government choose that name oblivious to its use in movies, or is this just a nickname ascribed to the system?

Intentional, I'm sure.

Britain put comms satellites up in 69 (to the present) called Skynet.

So hardly the first.

The Terminator was released in 1984, so it seems reasonable to rule out sci-fi as the inspiration for the British Skynet's name

It could have been the opposite (the movie was influenced by the British satellite network), however.

I wondered whether it might just be a nickname or a case of two different Chinese words translating to the same English word, but nope, both are 天网.

Here's the Baidu Baike page on Skynet from the movie: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A4%A9%E7%BD%91/3030631

Here's a post by the Chinese government, reporting that internet users demand Skynet to reach full coverage faster: http://www.gov.cn/zhuanti/2017-03/17/content_5178139.htm

So if it's a nickname, the Chinese government has no qualms about using it.

Yikes, really makes me wonder if they are getting ideas from dystopian science fiction films as well as black mirror.

This (天网, or "sky net") most likely comes from proverb "天网恢恢疏而不漏" (tian wang hui hui shu er bu lou), meaning "Justice has long arms."

This saying was from Lao Zi, going back thousands of years.

It might be both. Like here where .gov nerdy projects will be some long name starting with "Operational" that'll make the pointy hair bosses happy, but when you look at the title and subtitle it spells out Optimus Prime. I can imagine similar games being played in Mandarin.

It also sort of looks like heavenly internet, where heavenly or celestial has a lot of associations in Chinese that resist easy translation.

天网恢恢疏而不漏 pretty sure more then 99% people in China knows it. Terminator movie? 10% at most(which is crazily overestimated)

This article gives the impression that sanctions were put in place in response to humanitarian concerns.

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