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Intel AMD China Technology

China Tells Telecom Carriers To Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow To Intel, AMD (wsj.com) 45

China's push to replace foreign technology is now focused on cutting American chip makers out of the country's telecoms systems. From a report: Officials earlier this year directed the nation's largest telecom carriers to phase out foreign processors that are core to their networks by 2027, a move that would hit American chip giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, people familiar with the matter said. The deadline given by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology aims to accelerate efforts by Beijing to halt the use of such core chips in its telecom infrastructure. The regulator ordered state-owned mobile operators to inspect their networks for the prevalence of non-Chinese semiconductors and draft timelines to replace them, the people said.

In the past, efforts to get the industry to wean itself off foreign semiconductors have been hindered by the lack of good domestically made chips. Chinese telecom carriers' procurements show they are switching more to domestic alternatives, a move made possible in part because local chips' quality has improved and their performance has become more stable, the people said. Such an effort will hit Intel and AMD the hardest, they said. The two chip makers have in recent years provided the bulk of the core processors used in networking equipment in China and the world.

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China Tells Telecom Carriers To Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow To Intel, AMD

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  • Just remember kids, every time an American loses a job, an overweight, pasty rectangle-head gets his bonus.

  • .. and in other news, AI causes every other slashdot post to be about AI. For MONTHS on end...

  • US trade with the nation the CCP controls is bad for the US because it gives the enemy economic therefore social and political leverage.

    The Cold War never ended. Russia lost the first innings, the US and China (and their respective clients) won. Russian trade is no loss to the US but CCP economic penetration is a danger.

    The US trade deficit with the CCP more than buys the entire CCP armed forces. Delink and do business with democracies instead. Any short term inconvenience to the rich elites is a feature no

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by HBI ( 10338492 )

      You can keep telling yourself that, but the days when that would be fatal to China or constructive to the US are gone forever. Turning the US and its allies into a backwater will be the end result of that.

      The Chinese severing ties with us is bad for the US. They are the rising power, we are the declining one.

      • Eh. Stories of the decline of the US are greatly exaggerated, and often rely on metrics that are emotional rather than logical.
        We've got some pretty silly domestic issues at present, I'll grant you that.
        Our in-house science is still top-fucking-notch, though.

        Most of the cool shit around the world is built using licenses for US tech.
        TSMC's great silicon? Using ASML EUV licensed from... you guessed it- the US.
        BioNTech's rapid to-market mRNA vaccine? licensed from... you guessed it- the US.
        We design the
        • Sorry to break it to you...
          • ASML is dutch, selling hardware on a license from EUV LLC, a company formed from IP funded by the US government at several national labs and private companies.
            EUV LLC licensed the tech to 2 corporations- ASML, and SVG.
            ASML then bought SVG, leaving them as the only licensee.

            Sorry to break it to you ;)
            • > ASML is dutch, selling hardware on a license from EUV LLC

              I gather ASML is also using IP from many other sources.

              Making EUV: from lab to fab - https://www.asml.com/en/news/s... [asml.com]

              ASML Joins EUV-LLC Team - https://www.photonicsonline.co... [photonicsonline.com]

              + 1 by the way

              • I gather ASML is also using IP from many other sources.

                Almost certainly- but working EUV came from the US, funded by the US taxpayer.
                You will find there is a *lot* of that in the world. The US has long been in the business of developing technology, and licensing it for production, and not just to US corps (though in this instance, 1 of the licensees was a US corp, before ASML bought them)

                What's interesting is that since the US Government is the principle IP holder here (since EUV was largely developed in US national labs, paid for by US taxpayers) all licens

  • In other words (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Friday April 12, 2024 @06:45PM (#64390470)

    a move made possible in part because local chips' quality has improved and their performance has become more stable,

    All those Chinese [yahoo.com] people stealing [yahoo.com] chip [pcmag.com] technology [voanews.com] secrets have finally paid off.

    Hans Kristian Graebener = StoneToss

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      We have got to stop making this same mistake over and over and over again. But we won't.

      Same thing was said about the Japanese. They can only make inferior copies, nothing to worry about. Then Japanese cars got good and everyone was buying them, because it turned out that they were more than capable of doing their own R&D and improving reliability well beyond what our manufacturers were capable of.

      Huawei already beat us to it with 5G, and the same is happening with 5.5G and 6G. Multiple companies alread

  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Friday April 12, 2024 @07:08PM (#64390492)
    It’s hard to blame them. But this comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone. I’m sure Intel and AMD had written this market off 18 months ago. Anything they sold to China was just icing on a cake everyone knew was gonna be past it’s expiration date soon.

    The entire world is having another little fling with protectionism and industrial policy. This is not a new story and we know exactly how it ends - with everyone poorer. The Chinese government has gotten busy walling its economy off from the rest of the world. The west will suffer, China will suffer worse, and everyone will have less money to spend.
    • I think the west will suffer while China will be substantially insulated by domestic growth.

      China has more capital than it knows what to do with (thus Belt & Road), plus it still needs to lift hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty. That's hundreds of millions of people buying their family's first ever car, first ever dishwasher and first ever house without a dirt floor. All made in China. That's 50 years of 5% guaranteed annual growth - without even trying.

      Compare that with the
      • I hope youre right. I seriously do. A thriving, first world China would be a huge bonus for the world. But that requires them to match domestic consumption to production. Large consumption stimulus would be needed, but their emperor views that as a decadent western concept. So far, hes doubling down on the export driven economic model, and backtracking on capitalism, keeping his subjects poor while exporting their productivity. Which is gonna cause major problems unless he changes track. Its exactly what Ru
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      AMD is still licencing their designs to Chinese companies who produce their own versions. That's how they are staying in the Chinese market - partner with a domestic company that isn't subject to the ban on foreign made CPUs for government machines.

      The domestic versions of AMD chips are mostly the same, but on an older process node so performance isn't as good, and with some security critical parts replaced by domestic designs (the RNG, crypto operations, and fTPM, for example).

  • Networking gear running on Intel and AMD chips?
    • Yup. For years now.
      Off the top of my head, Aristas (linux), Junipers(freebsd), Ciscos(linux), Allied Telesis....es? ii? (linux) are all running AMD or Intel x86 for their control plane.
      The data planes are of course usually an off the shelf Broadcom, or one of their competitors.
  • This would be a very smart move for a nation if they're expecting a shortage of components in the near future.

    For instance as a result of an invasion of Taiwan.

  • by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Friday April 12, 2024 @07:43PM (#64390528)

    from TFS:

    Officials earlier this year directed the nation's largest telecom carriers to phase out foreign processors that are core to their networks by 2027, a move that would hit American chip giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices

    [emphasis mine]

    the most prevalent place were such chips are used is in the form of the 5G core and NGN SoftSwitches. Nowadays, most of them (Specially the chinese made) use OpenStack (as required by the 3GPP) with NFV functions on top. And in the case of the chinese, they wrote their own NFVs.

    Just Recompile for ARM/MIPS/Longsoon/RISC-V and you are golden.

    Besides, is not like you need the most advanced nodes, as you could compensate by doing multi-socket mobos. These are 4U or more machines we are talking about. Yes, not as dense compute as one would like, but this is not Hypercloud, HPC or AI we are talking about, a small-ish datacenter would do.

    JM2C YMMV

    • They're likely talking about NFVs, as you mentioned, but if there is any non-Huawei routing or switching gear in their network, it's also using Intel or AMD x86 for its control plane, and has been for years.
      I imagine Huawei transitioned off of that, but they used to there too.
      • They're likely talking about NFVs, as you mentioned, but if there is any non-Huawei routing or switching gear in their network, it's also using Intel or AMD x86 for its control plane, and has been for years.

        I imagine Huawei transitioned off of that, but they used to there too.

        Nope, for a long while Huawei used IBM's PowerPC in the softswitches and 3G/4G cores, running WindRiver as the RTOS. But I do not know if they went a different route since then. Having said that, I know for certain they are firm believers in OpenStack.

        • The NE8000 had dual Xeons in them.
          Unsure if they still do.
          Being they were using dual Xeons, presumably they felt that they needed more power than a PPC could supply.
  • Yes they have some devices that will run Intel code, but at a vastly reduced speed and much higher power consumption. There's an adjacent article here describing how Huawei is desperately hiring foreign engineers and working them to the bone to develop semiconductors.

    At some point in the future China may be at parity with current state-of-the-art chip technology. By that time the rest of the world will have moved far foreword.

    • China's semiconductor goal is for feature-for-feature parity by 2030 using 100% domestically owned IP. Every year they're a bit closer to the moving target than the year prior.
    • They have Arm CPUs with Zen3 per-core performance already.
      Their RISC-V parts have reached parity with stock Arm-designed cores (which is still quite a bit behind what any of the non-stock Arm cores can do)

      They're not nearly as far behind as you think they are.
  • Here in the EU governments tells telecom carriers to phase out Chinese equipment, of course Chinese government do the same with Western chips. When you start a trade war, a trade war you get.

It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river. -- Abraham Lincoln

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