Is the US slowly bowing out of the international tech scene?<p>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.<p>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.
This seems insane, but appears to be true. Here's an article with a little more supporting information:<p><a href="http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/04/08/chinese-supercomputing-orgs-placed-on-us-entity-list/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/04/08/chinese-supercomputing-org...</a><p>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.
Guess the Chinese were on the right track when they started their programs for domestic CPUs and other computing parts. With a bit of luck, the rest of the world gets useable alternatives to Intel and therefore cheaper chips out of it.
I know this is nitpicking but... I really hate when journalists who I would presume have some studies in literature, confuse "then" and "than".<p>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.<p>Like I said, totally nitpicking on an otherwise interesting article but still...<p>"...with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket <i>then</i> even the next generation Xeon Phi..."<p>/rant
I find it interesting to consider valuations for the two costs in allowing the chips to be used.<p>Intel chip revenue, and future business growth = +X<p>Security concerns, and future security concerns = -Y<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So perhaps this is not a US vs China thing at all. Maybe there's some other strategy at play.
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?<p>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!<p>That said, I think this is a <i>good</i> 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.
Denying tech sales to China, at this stage is just causing minor nuisance. In not-so-far future China is going to be much stronger economy than US ever was. If they want the bigger computers, they will have the bigger computers. Just calculate any "damage" done with those export rules on Chinese military - is it $2B more that needs to be spent in order to get the same capability? Or $20B? You can just watch that money float right past you to their domestic HPC and CPU industries. In effect, US is trying it's damnest to make China competitive in the one major high tech export industry that it still has undisputed world leadership in.<p>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 can't help but feel that not supplying processors to the "National University of Defense Technology" is basically a textbook use of export regs?<p>I don't really understand why people are complaining about this one?
I bet there's some secret info that we don't get to know that would make this bizarre move make more sense. Maybe China is using this computer to crack military servers or something.
It appears the US Government is making it up intel by having them use the chips in a new supercomputer for the department of energy.<p><a href="http://techreport.com/news/28092/xeon-phi-chips-will-fuel-180-petaflop-doe-supercomputer" rel="nofollow">http://techreport.com/news/28092/xeon-phi-chips-will-fuel-18...</a>
> 'opened the kimono'<p>Kimonos are Japanese, not Chinese.<p>EDIT: I understand that 'opened the kimono' is already a phrase but it seems like it was used because the article is about china.
Meta: there's something funny about the very aggressive, sarcastic way the article is written. Not journalistic at all and pretty annoying to read even though there is good information in it.<p>> <i>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.</i>
China needs not to worry about this.<p>And by the way few people do math "heavy lifting" with x86 CPUs today, they would rather do it in a GPU<p>China has the fabs and the expertise (or at least it is getting there). It's a non issue.<p>"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.
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Can we get a title change? It's misleading.<p>> ... 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.<p>If I understand correctly Intel can't sell them <i>any tech</i> nor can anyone else in the US.