China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in government computers
Microsoft’s Windows and foreign database programs also sidelined as Beijing favours Chinese hardware and software
Among the 18 approved processors were chips from Huawei and state-backed group Phytium. Both are on Washington’s export blacklist. Chinese processor makers are using a mixture of chip architectures including Intel’s x86, Arm and homegrown ones, while operating systems are derived from open-source Linux software.
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Chips cold war? Doesn't sound too bad if we got to see more competition
It's the year of the Red Star OS desktop!
It's honestly surprising they ever did.
You'd figure they'd go as far as banning them for the whole country to give their own companies the market.
Gonna have to make room on my NAS for some Chinux distros.
Do they really have good enough chips? I thought this stuff was hard to do.
That probably explain why they're investing so much in RISC-V.
Are the chips easier to make?
Substantially. CISC vs RISC is night and day. Keeping x86 for so long was a mistake, but one that generated billions in value for shareholders.
Oh I love it when shareholders get their value!!
If I can ask, if we go way back like 40 or 50 years ago, why did cisc get adopted over risc?
Cisc was never adopted. It all started out basic, then they gradually added more and more shit until you had a complex CPU.
Without the concept of risc there wouldn’t be a cisc.
Additionally to the other answer: the reason CISC came up to be was "less instructions". Memory was a lot more expensive, and developers worked in assembly a lot more. So, less instructions made a lot of sense. Now, memory is cheap, and developers almost never write assembly unassisted.
But the manufacturing is still an issue.
They already have their own x86 chips. They're a few generations behind the cutting edge. They've been catching up fast which is why the US and EU have been shitting their pants trying to wage cold war. All of a sudden ramping up the China bad narrative out of left field when not long ago they were trying to work with China rather than against them..
Much of the manufacturing difficulty we hear about with western industry is achieving highest yields possible of the most powerful chips to please ravenous shareholders demanding flawless profit gains every quarter. Capitalism problems in other words. It's much different when your goal is merely to produce computers for government office use. You can still use old computers for the majority of computing needs.
New ARM chip from Loongson is supposedly competitive with Zen 3 (launched November 2020).
you dont need much to run most government level computers, and I say this knowing what lind of conputers in general some of the U.S offices were running. China already has their own build of linux for government computers, and deceloping a basic cpu for governmental office purposes wouldnt be too difficult in thr grand scheme of things.
Some of these systems were still running COBOL-coded programs and failed due to Corona overload. US asked rerired elderly devs to come and fix it because no one learnt that shit for years. That's what describes most tech in public services and governments, worldwide.
No!!! You aren't allowed to do that! Only America is allowed to be protectionist 😠 😠 😠
Do you have any idea how protectionist China has been for the past several decades? Nothing the US has done comes even close to their long standing policies.
They ban certain media properties and cultural imports, but they've been open for business to developers and industry my entire life. This recent wave is way different. This is an actual industrial supply-side commodity that is used in production, not a controversial movie.
Something new has been happening since America launched the chip tradewar and the performative attacks against Xinjiang province.
In all likelihood, they've been open for business to make it easier to nab intellectual property from the rightful owners. China has probably just decided they've learned enough to make their own "homegrown" products, and can safely kick all the western businesses out of the market.
Based
What controversial movie are we talking?
Well they banned Ghostbusters for depicting ghosts.
Maybe "controversial" isn't the right word.
Except in many cases you cannot sell directly in China, but you need to "partner up" with a Chinese corporation in order to sell there (aka technology transfer). You then need the Chinese government approval and possibly a CCP person on the board
... So? This is clearly different - Intel and AMD can't partner up with a Chinese corporation to sell chips anymore, they're just banned. That's new.
Also? It's the Communist Party of China: CPC
Yeah, I was saying that China has been open for business, but only at certain political conditions. Now these conditions are changing
Also, it's usually CCP in the US, CPC in China, PCC in Italy etc. Depends on your language. Same with the old Soviet Union, CCCP in Russia, USSR in US, URSS in Italy and so on. It's an acronym.
Their actual English name is the Communist Party of China. CPC. There's no reason to call them the CCP. I have theories about why US sources do that, conjuring up Cold War ghosts of the CCCP, but the fact remains that they're wrong.
It's like how, in the US, the Democratic Party is sometimes called the Democrat Party. It's not necessarily meant to invoke hostility, but it very often is a dog whistle. We've just, unfortunately, gotten used to it.