Guangzhou Supercomputer Center Added to US Technology “Denial List”
vrworld.com
vrworld.com
China is still going to get their processors from somewhere, the difference is if they don't get them from US companies then no money gets added to the US economy when they do buy their chips.
This type of government interference doesn't hurt Chinese businesses at all, but could damage or destroy US-based businesses that may depend on foreign customers to stay afloat. This only serves to hurt US business and limit the amount of money being added to the US economy by Chinese consumers. It feels like a spiteful, self-destructive move to me.
Also, there are other considerations at hand, such as making life harder for foreign intelligence agencies.
If you owned a Volkswagen car and required specialized parts which were were denied to you, and you upgraded to a different make of car like Volvo, what good would Wolkswagen spare parts serve to you? You're not going to switch back to VW just because the spare parts are available on the market again…you've moved on by that point.
As we say where I live: «L'avion c'est en vol!» (“The plane has taken off” ~= That Ship has sailed)
The 'stealing' part takes on many forms. One of them is:
http://thediplomat.com/2013/11/how-china-plans-to-use-the-su...
> Russia understandably became upset when its star export appeared as an indigenously produced J-11 in China – without a licensing agreement.
In short, China has a pretty large technological gap, and does anything necessary to shorten the gap as quickly as possible.
And that's the government. There's no indication that private Chinese companies are any better in this regard. In fact, you can even find 'counterfeit' cars.
One wonders why US companies outsource their manufacturing there. Their technology will be 're purposed', without any need of industrial espionage, by the standard definition of it.
Intel and AMD have fabs all over Europe and the Middle East. Germany and Israel are known for their processor fabs.
Processor makers are multinationals, not national companies. Both AMD and Intel are bigger than the US.
If China stops buying from major multinational US companies, the entire Western tech industry will be hurt. No American jobs are lost when a German AMD fabricator has less demand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sit...
AMD is now a fabless company. They contract with other companies that own fabs.
Just to add they use GlobalFoundries (US) but also TSMC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC
There are several outside of the US http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricati...
http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/04/08/chinese-supercomputing-org...
While I'm excited that Intel may experience greater competition (resulting in lower profits and faster development) I wouldn't have expected this to be the mechanism.
I'm not a native English speaker and I know the difference, and for some reason this particular mistake and "their/they're/there" makes me choke.
Like I said, totally nitpicking on an otherwise interesting article but still...
"...with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi..."
/rant
Interesting. What kind of dialects are you referring to?
Intel chip revenue, and future business growth = +X
Security concerns, and future security concerns = -Y
I really wonder what the value of X-Y is, i.e., what's the net benefit? It's hard to reason about as a member of the public without inside information. Y is particularly opaque in this case.
Also I really think the narrative of China versus or competing with the US is overcooked. It's my feeling that both countries have far more pressing domestic and regional concerns than each other, and could stand to benefit far more from mutual strength than from any adversity. I guess the narrative makes for compelling reading tho, on both sides, for public consumption. Maybe similar to how the West vs Russia narrative of the Cold War promoted scientific activity.
I just think the world's substantially moved on from such binary narratives, because as countries have developed and strengthened economic relationships, they actually have less to worry about in terms of conflict with each other. Then again, I guess a lot of what happens is opaque to reasoning about form the outside.
So perhaps this is not a US vs China thing at all. Maybe there's some other strategy at play.
However domestic concerns that are hard to solve can benefit from (made-up) external concerns. It has also been used to enforce power internally.
Other than that domestic concerns have the problem that solving them can change status quo and give the fact that such decisions of course are made by people that are currently in power it might play a role in keeping that power, also by distracting from the fact that it might not be to the benefit of the people.
That of course doesn't have to be the main case and probably isn't here, but of course that is a pattern, basically like evolution or evolving systems (not just biologically). Status quo of being alive and dominant usually means that this dominance will be used to keep it, which often results in stagnation, which may lead to the benefit becoming a handicap later - like when you are too specialized to status quo.
The US (government wise) seems to lately struggle a bit with the world being/becoming multi polar. Like not talking in a bad way, but of course one has to consider that we are basically just past a century that was basically about an unipolar world with the US as the only superpower and even if society and especially individuals change more quickly such a huge structure tends to be a bit slower, which is something we can see when we look for example at old/ancient laws, institutions, etc. that still exist.
From a startup perspective: You might consider the old economy slow, but governments and especially the structures surrounding them are even slower.
On the other hand it might also be related to something like "I am pissed at you, so you don't get it. Take that" things that sometimes happen, often causing big effects despite just being a temporal disagreement on some completely unrelated topic. After all there is just ordinary people working behind the scenes.
Of course there are traditional ones like Palantir and veteran spin offs for intelligence and military procurement. And there's the big and small DoD contractors in Maryland. And I've also at various times heard about startups that aim to "digitize" government in terms of putting forms and processes in the cloud.
In some ostentatiously liberal places like in South America it seems these kind of digitisation startups are more popular, because there they're proud of how "progressive" they are :)
I just feel there has to be way way more possibilities. Maybe I'm just out of the loop tho, and there's lots of movement.
Basically I like government, because I feel the fundamental principle is noble: safeguarding order for the people. And I feel like all the things which don't work, like corruption, are simply inefficiencies which will be removed as the model (and maybe the tech) evolves.
Status quo is often raised as a criticism of government, and status quo is government's core purpose, and doesn't necessarily mean it's sinister or stagnant, tho those sides can emerge.
I think it really works that while everyone is rushing ahead to push their own agendas, there's large groups who are mostly trying to safeguard the order we already have. It seems to be not like an evil, and instead a necessary balance.
So I don't think status quo needs to equal corruption, or lack of innovation: you can find better ways to maintain what you have!
Also the issues that are sometimes attributed to the status quo attribute of government I believe stem from other things. The narrative of a crusty elite few concocting repressive schemes to hold onto the power they're so afraid the proles will somehow steal from them, even tho the proles haven't interfered with said elites success in the first place -- just seems like something too much out of a hero villain trope from the popular consciousness, and lacking in fidelity or explanatory power for reality. I'd go so far as to say this is the "Disney delusion" because the spectre of such fictional villains is alike to something conjured by the finest Disney cartoons! :)
Another cognitive dissonance is people attribute the outsized evils effected by governments to so called outsized evil of the people in them. It's actually because power is a force magnifier, so ordinary evil, or which there is plenty even in everyday life, is given outsized expression through the lens of governments. Actually, with how chaotic individuals are I find it an amazing miracle that governments are as peaceful and stable as they are. Which no doubt stems from the conspicuous effort of people involved.
So while it's a sometimes a common narrative to sledge governments, for a number of reasons only some of which I touch on here, I feel a more balanced view of them is clearer. And without a clear view, how can we operate effectively?
None of which is to say that there aren't plenty of opportunities to create improvements in governments, a fact which, given the stakes, seems surprising more startups aren't magnetically drawn to it. An important point is I feel one reason contributing to lack of sexiness of government for startups is incorrect stories about government that we are inclined to tell.
I basically think that ordinary people don't reason usefully about power, because they feel it's something somewhat incomprehensible to them, so they fallback to tools like the fake hero villain story above, comfortable "creation" myths which seem to explain the world, and actually may not.
This lack of widespread useful conceptual tools for thinking about government and power may be one reason contributing to the dearth of government startups, if there is such a lack!
Thanks for your comment, I hope you also got something out of this, I appreciate the opportunity to touch on such ideas.
Also, the reason given for this is so hilarious. China is using the supercomputers to "research nuclear explosions". China is doing WHAT?! Stop the presses! China is going to have a nuke!
That said, I think this is a good outcome for China. It will just force them to build out their own chips (okay, on top of ARM, MIPS, OpenPOWER or even RISC-V - but why not?!). More competition for Intel is a good thing.
Citizenship of the internet does not entitle you to the same rights as a US citizen, and we should stop acting like the US government gives a solitary fuck about anybody who wasn't born in the US, and protesting with our wallets doesn't work so well when there is no usable alternative.
so yes, I applaud the idea of another country developing comparable silicon to Intel, and I applaud the idea of each country having it's own webmail provider.
and every time the US government does something which treads on those who are feeding it money, it makes me a little happy that one day they'll annoy everyone enough to not put up with it.. even if the services are better.
sometimes CBP/FBI/etc. happen to do their job :)
http://www.fbi.gov/sanfrancisco/press-releases/2015/san-fran...
The ability to computationally model nuclear explosions is strategically important. This permits development of new nuclear weapons designs without violating the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty.
Only circumstance this would make any sense would be if you were sliding fast and inevitably to open conflict, and causing them setbacks worth of a few months to a couple of years would be vital. Since that is not the case, this has nothing but "strategic blunder" written all over it.
I don't really understand why people are complaining about this one?
Furthermore, by denying Intel chips in such a high profile manner, this will likely cause all sorts of antagonization, and reduce the ability to pressure/guide Chinese growth and development in directions that are more beneficial for American/Western interests.
It also won't be a scenario that China hasn't planned for. The reason that China's been building up its chipmakers over the last few years is for precisely this scenario; reducing the reliance on American tech. They've been doing this quite successfully; Cisco now aren't able to do business with the Chinese government, iirc.
Lastly, Tianhe-2 was a $400 million computer. The decision to block American collaboration on a project valued at a considerable fraction of $1 billion isn't made by some office clerk; it will have been considered at the highest levels of at least the military, but most likely the government in general.
It's a diplomatic maneuvre specifically designed to hurt China. Intel's just been caught in the crossfire. They could easily be pacified (for example, by giving them a supercomputer contract in the US).
In terms of the Chinese reaction, antagonization is probably the point.
> By the time I became NSA director in the late 1990s, however, the calculation was no longer that simple. We still wanted an MTOPS advantage, of course, but we were fast realizing that our preferred limits were undermining the global competitiveness of the U.S. computer industry — the very industry on which we relied for our success. It was becoming clear that the overall health of that industry was more important than any MTOPS advantage against a specific target country. We still insisted on limits with regard to places such as Cuba and North Korea, but we became far more forgiving elsewhere.
This, of course, had a powerful, positive commercial impact, but the NSA didn’t flip its position for commercial reasons. We did it for security reasons. On balance, this change made us stronger, not weaker, over the long haul, since retarding exports would inevitably retard the technological progress that was both our economic and our security lifeblood.
That early lesson has caused me to continue to challenge arguments that technological protectionism furthers national security. It might, but then again, it could have the opposite effect if it freezes development, alienates allies, feeds distrust or invites the creation of similar barriers abroad. I would recommend these broader considerations to those in the U.S. security enterprise with responsibility for evaluating these trade-offs today.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-let-america-be-b...
Which tells me that either the doctrine has changed in the last 10 years, or that this deal doesn't fit into his model, or that this is a diplomatic maneuvre. My guess is one of the latter two, although I could be wrong.
The world we live in is far from free market, for everything from solar panels to textiles [0].
A really obvious place in which one might actually want the opposite of a free market is in military tech.
Exporting the tech behind a computer that'll presumably be used for mostly military purposes is something that could be expected to be frowned upon in certain circumstances.
[0] - http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-launches-new-trade-challenge...
But still be the main sponsor of various terrorist organizations.
However, that's a different story. The thing that is upsetting here though it is that this is about a country with a legit, well-respected government, that is not known for violent anti-Americanism, etc. Oh and the population-wise biggest country in the world, often considered the only competitor to the US.
I think that's a big deal.
All we really hear about on the outside is the screwups. The successes are silent.
That's not a catch, that's an unfalsifiable statement. Here's another way to end your comment for which there is a lot more evidence:
All we really hear about on the outside are the big screwups. All the normal screwups and marginal successes are silent.
Here's a great article on just how crappy the record of these secret organizations is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...
http://techreport.com/news/28092/xeon-phi-chips-will-fuel-18...
Kimonos are Japanese, not Chinese.
EDIT: I understand that 'opened the kimono' is already a phrase but it seems like it was used because the article is about china.
Yes, but it looks like the author thought they were being clever by using that specific phrase, given the article was about China.
> You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.
And by the way few people do math "heavy lifting" with x86 CPUs today, they would rather do it in a GPU
China has the fabs and the expertise (or at least it is getting there). It's a non issue.
"They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side. "
This depends on the workload, really; some workloads are quite GPU-unfriendly. In any case, the supercomputer in question---Tianhe-2 [2]---derives most of its computing power from the Xeon Phi [1], a x86-ish many-core vector processor which looks much like a GPU.
> ... Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites.
If I understand correctly Intel can't sell them any tech nor can anyone else in the US.
A lot less flashy and baity though.