Huawei Says It's Made a 100% Chinese PC (theregister.com) 46
Huawei has unveiled the Qingyun HM650, a desktop PC it claims is made entirely from Chinese-manufactured components, including its own 10-core Kirin X90 processor and an enterprise version of HarmonyOS. "While Huawei has reportedly claimed local companies manufactured 100 percent of the components in the machine, it is unclear if all those components use Chinese designs," notes The Register. From the report: A single Chinese government agency has reportedly signed up for 600 of the machines. That's not an indication this machine is a curiosity, because Beijing has ordered all government entities to shift from Wintel boxes to local alternatives. [...] Even if Huawei is using some parts that aren't entirely Chinese, the debut of the Qingyun HM650 is bad news for Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, as all are suffering as the PC market shrinks due to the rising cost of memory. China's government is an enormous buyer, and losing the chance to bid for its business is unlikely to be helpful.
Shameless First Post Hijacking (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to be a contrarian my first post would have been: Qingyun HM650 is based on ARM, provided by a British based Japanese owned company; and HarmonyOS is based on an Android fork by Google, a US based company. They are still too dependent on non-Chinese tech to claim 100% Chinese PC.
But Wikipedia says HarmonyOS 5 drops Android (AOSP), and drops the Linux kernel, in favor of the in house HongMeng microkernel.
So I just want to see a Qingyun RISC V processor replacing that ARM instruction set.
Sadly HongMeng microkernel is not open source?
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RISC V is free but comes from U.C. Berkeley.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
Re: Shameless First Post Hijacking (Score:2)
Re: Shameless First Post Hijacking (Score:5, Informative)
Yet I shipped two in-house ARM designs that licensed the architecture and not the main implementation. We did license some modules that you generally need to make a working ARM.
That said, RISC-V International gives you a spec, and isn't selling you an implementation. Where as ARM Holdings plc does both, with most vendors opting to license a design and adapt it to their needs. But Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple, and of course DEC have shipped custom or partially custom ARM chips.
Architecturally RISC-V is quite MIPS-like, but organized better for adding extensions. The aarch64 instruction set is a little more MIPS like and less ARM-like than its 32-bit counterpart. (XZR/WZR being kind of like $zero, and the removal of shift operations that leaves behind a big ARM heritage).
The interesting part for ASIC and embedded processors is that RISC-V has a reasonable system for vendor extensions. Allowing one to add some custom instructions or to implement an extension on a lower end core that helps it compete with a higher end configuration. The vendor instructions are always a bit of a compromise and make the tooling difficult. Thankfully it occurs less often, as there are quite a few standardized configurations now. (I maintain a small rv32 emulator that can do a few configurations, it can do accurate single-precision floating point, but it has to fake the double-precision stuff with the host's hardware. good enough to run a typical program but not good enough to get golden CRCs for simulation)
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AArch64 is designed to be a more modern instruction set that's more adept for superscalar core designs. This means features that that stall the pipeline need to be eliminated. This includes features like the barrel shifter (it affects a lot of instructions and many functional units would have to dup
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Is predicated execution still used?
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Never mind. Wikipedia says no. I should have looked there first. :)
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RISC-V has a lot of variances... from 16 bit to 128 bit, IIRC. China has done a lot with the architecture. For years, I've been seeing, even with creaky old drivers and kernel patches pretty amazing performance coming from chip makers. I thought Centaur/Via/Zhaoxin would have made the "national Chip of China", but looks like the architecture wasn't flexible enough.
Overall, I'm glad to see RISC-V improve. It overall has a lot of room to grow, while x86/amd64 needs to be replaced. There is only a certain
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I don't think it matters that RISC V originated from the US though, as long as there are no licencing fees and no intellectual property claims on it.
Huawei has a track record of coming in and becoming a major force in foreign tech, like enterprise network hardware, cellular, WiFi, and so on. It all depends on the licencing, and the Chinese government is probably keen on it as well because it means the US can't cut them off from such things without completely screwing themselves as well. A kind of mutually a
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I don't think it matters that RISC V originated from the US though,
It's an arbitrary contest, I suppose people can make up any rules for it they like.
Under my rules, Americans get a nod for ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8, etc.
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Unicode was a bit of a disaster for Chinese though, because they tried to merge it with Japanese and Korean.
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The good old Han Unification issue. Which is not so much of an issue if you have the appropriate font installed, which meta-data can help select.
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It's bad when your universal character encoding scheme requires you to select the right font to fix its shortcomings.
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Yes, they should spawn a RISC-V chip and do it better. Really. ARM is looking over its shoulder for a reason.
But I'm impressed you refused to unleash the TDS and spew. Good on you.
Re: Shameless First Post Hijacking (Score:2)
Why are you invoking that pedo shit?
Re: Shameless First Post Hijacking (Score:2)
I was responding to a comment that did NOT invoke 'that pedo shit?'
So you don't even read these?
Re: Shameless First Post Hijacking (Score:2)
I read it, I still had the question, neither comment explains why you felt it was necessary
Re: Shameless First Post Hijacking (Score:2)
The OP did, Pootin.
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I don't think you need to sound so apologetic in your Subject. You're just preventing propagation of the sock puppet tripe. But maybe it's better to be explicit about it? I just think it's better to ignore AC with substance, including a relevant and nonvacuous Subject, whereas yours is a metasubject.
On your actual topic, even the Chinese are standing on the shoulders of giants? (But that may have been intended as a personal attack on Hooke.)
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The important part is they've eliminated the Omelas security processor.
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But Wikipedia says HarmonyOS 5 drops Android (AOSP), and drops the Linux kernel, in favor of the in house HongMeng microkernel.
Up here in the related links there is an article about China moving government agencies to Linux [slashdot.org]. Now they're also dumping Linux for HarmonyOS?
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It's just made with "Chinese values in mind."
Now can we trust Huawei? (Score:2)
Gimme Funny! Have to say it explicitly since Slashdot's sense of humor is so residual and twisted these years.
Leaving the Subjective joke behind because I still can't write funny, the story does make me nostalgic for the old days when Huawei seemed to be a relatively good source for my electronic toys. High performance and low prices. My dangerous assumption was that the non-Chinese security experts were still able to assess the security and privacy threats and therefore Huawei wasn't going to play any game
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Are you saying there was a smoking gun when it came to Huawei? All I ever saw was politicians claiming they could be doing something bad but never any form of proof, or even what they were supposed to be doing which was bad. This was during Donald's first Administration and it was luminaries like Tom Cotton jumping onto the bandwagon but never actually making substantative claims.
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No, so I guess that means I agree with you on that part of it? I think the problem is that we basically surrendered on the idea that we could detect the gun irrespective of whether it was smoking or not. Not sure if "we" should be limited to America or extended to the rest of the world. Or maybe even extremely limited to security experts.
Maybe I need a disclaimer that I am not an official security expert of any sort, just a somewhat educated bystander. My initial approaches involved considering hardware fea
That's not hard (Score:5, Insightful)
All the parts are made there. They're probably using a licensed core, though. All of their performant CPUs are based around them.
What would be hard is making a PC with all American components.
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X90 is said to be an ARM chip, yes. Not sure if its v8 or v9.
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X90 is said to be an ARM chip, yes. Not sure if its v8 or v9.
Huawei has a ARM v8 architectural license, but the X90, as a custom v8 design, reportedly includes some v9 family elements (but is not a complete v9, as that would require renegotiating the ARM license).
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Curious that they're nibbling around the edges of what is allowed by their license.
Re:That's not hard (Score:4, Interesting)
The CPU is ARM, so they are using European tech. I bet Huawei is looking at RISC V options very closely though.
It doesn't matter. It's like their GPUs. They might not be able to match AMD and Nvidia, they might not even be compatible with all the latest AAA games... But they play the stuff that is popular in China very well, and they cost a fraction of what the American ones do.
And you can actually buy them, which these days is a novelty.
Lots of people are already using Chinese tablets and phones. The phones are some of the very best, and some of the cheapest. They have products to suit all and particularly if you just want something for media consumption/kids, the low end stuff is incredible value. Need an SBC but Raspberry Pi is looking very expensive? They have that covered too. Network KVMs that used to cost hundreds of Euros are in the double digits now. They actually want to sell to consumers, not just AI slop factories.
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They won't because a). sanctions and b). RAM prices are so high that people won't want their X90 if the RAM is too expensive to justify jt.
Is this even that surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It kinda did. Stallman used to have a Chinese laptop which had a MIPS CPU. I think most, if not all of it, was made in China. Certainly the CPU and boot ROM were, which is what he cared about.
That was back in the 2000s. A decade ago there were Chinese manufacturers making licensed AMD CPUs, with a few tweaks to remove the US designed hardware random number generator and replace it with a Chinese one. Performance wasn't as good due to lack of cutting edge fabs, but it ran x86 code well enough for a lot of pe
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\o/ (Score:1)
*Everyone* is moving away from US tech - not just China.
Your Outsourcing Coming Home to Roost (Score:3)
RAM (Score:3)
My question is if the RAM is DDR4 or DDR5 and if that Chinese manufactured RAM is sold elsewhere at affordable prices.
Sure, but... (Score:2)
This is exactly what the warnings predicted (Score:2)
By placing embargoes on technology exports, the chinese were incentivized to build their own. Sure, they run open-source software, but how are you going to embargo that?