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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>The Wall Street Journal story omits important factual details, including the fact that AMD put significant protections in place to protect its intellectual property (IP) and prevent valuable IP from being misused or reverse engineered to develop future generations of processors.

Without knowing what those protections are, I'm not sure we have learned much.

Also the US government not objecting, I'm not sure changes the gist of the story does it?

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Without knowing what those protections are, we haven't learned much from either the story or the response.

The gist of the story wasn't just that a lot was shared; it was that it was shared nefariously, borderline illegally, and it was all AMD's fault and intention. It essentially painted them as mercenary traitors.

I admit, the original story does sound bad. But I'm also aware of how easy it is to paint such a picture, ando find it hard to believe the US Government couldn't have shut this down if it really wanted to.

It's also reasonable to believe that the "government" is not all on the same page. Everything can be true: some officials were happy to greenlight the tech transfer at the beginning of the process, other parts of government found out and disagreed but their hands were tied, and amidst all of that AMD leadership firmly and rationally believes that it's not being traitorous to transfer tech of Gen N when China's desperately stuck on Gen N-2 and "state of the art" used by the US is Gen N+5.

Eh, the lean of the article and the comments on the original HN thread were knocking AMD for it as if they were going against American interests by being successfully bullied by China into giving up valuable IP.

AMD is saying that a) the IP was not of the highest value or performance, and b) it's unlikely to go against American national security interests when DoC and DoJ both give explicit sign-off. Remember too that this was in the Obama era, when the likelihood of sailing the country down a river for $$$ was lower.

I think you’ve got it backward. The likelihood is that the Obama administration treated China more like an ally and less as a hostile power than Trump has treated them.

Obama spent a lot of political and reputational capital on the TPP. The only purpose of TPP was to counteract China. I think it would be very surprising if they were treating China as an ally.

You have it backwards.

The two key claims by AMD -- that they only transferred lower performing technology and that all the things were blessed by US government -- were cited nearly verbatim in the WSJ story. I can't find anything in the AMD statement that adds meaningfully to the case; it's a non-rebutting rebuttal.

Whatever. If they really did unzip for the Chinese military as the WSJ claims then AMD will soon find itself competing with Chinese government subsidized derivatives of their IP and have next to no meaningful recourse with any governing authority.

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