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Those Xeon chips are mainstream server chips, are they not? And this restriction seems to affect only a few Chinese entities. So what's to stop China from getting the same chips from Intel through another company? Is the U.S. just going to play whack-a-mole with them?

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.

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I agree, we should be pushing for more dominant companies outside of the US, given how abhorrently hostile they are to "foreigners".

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.

>So what's to stop China from getting the same chips from Intel through another company?

sometimes CBP/FBI/etc. happen to do their job :)

http://www.fbi.gov/sanfrancisco/press-releases/2015/san-fran...

Wow, he was busted for exporting FPGAs that were rated for the wrong temperature range. I'm not saying it wasn't nefarious, but it is crazy that Automotive grade is completely legal at -40C - 125C and but go a little colder to milspec (-55C - 125C) and you are going to jail.

> 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!

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.

They already have a mips chip programme aimed at supercomputers, although they are not as performant as xeon.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#Supercomputers

Why is the parent being downvoted? This post doesn't come across to me as off-topic or offensive in any way.

Yeah I was thinking much the same. I really do believe that we should just remove the downvote button entirely, too many people abusing it for the wrong reasons. An entirely upvote-oriented site would work reasonably well. You could still flag offensive comments if need be.

Tianhe-2 uses Xeon Phi, not the mainstream Xeon processors. By the way, even mainstream Xeons can have very different performance depending on the specific model.

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