I really don't see the point to US federal export control regulations on high-end x86-64 processors.<p>If somebody in a foreign adversary country (Russia? China?) were determined to build a really powerful supercomputer using the latest and great Intel or AMD CPUs, without sourcing them all in one batch officially, with sufficient financial resources and shell entities spread out around the world they absolutely could purchase enough processors by smurfing. Have dozens of small entities purchase small enough batches to fly under the radar.<p><a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/smurf.asp" rel="nofollow">https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/smurf.asp</a><p>Or just set up a fake cloud/VM/web hosting operation in a friendly country and buy thousands of Supermicro, Quanta or similar barebones servers with CPUs already installed, and then divert them.<p>It's just as futile as trying to stop people from buying high tech things in Dubai and shipping them to Iran.
"Starting in 2015, AMD diligently and proactively briefed the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce and multiple other agencies within the U.S. Government before entering into the joint ventures. AMD received no objections whatsoever from any agency to the formation of the joint ventures or to the transfer of technology – technology which was of lower performance than other commercially available processors. In fact, prior to the formation of the joint ventures and the transfer of technology, the Department of Commerce notified AMD that the technology proposed was not restricted or otherwise prohibited from being transferred. Given this clear feedback, AMD moved ahead with the joint ventures."<p>Is this basically a "give us a big fat contract or pay us to not do this" request that the US Government passed on?
I wonder if anything more is known on the Sunway SW26010 260C 1.45GHz processor which powers world's 3rd best supercomputer:<p><a href="https://www.top500.org/system/178764" rel="nofollow">https://www.top500.org/system/178764</a>