
AMD Responds to WSJ ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ Story - JackFaker
https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/wsj-response
======
yorwba
Earlier HN thread on the WSJ article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20300100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20300100)

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tinktank
Hypothetical question: Let's say a news source writes a story that tanks a
company's stock price and then, over the course of time the company is able to
prove the story is false and/or the news source is unable to back up the
story. Can the company sue the newspaper for damages?

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Oh, like Bloomberg's _The Big Hack_?

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closetohome
First thing that came to mind. As far as I know they're still claiming it was
accurate.

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blueboo
And it certainly hasn’t been proven false

~~~
lame-robot-hoax
I mean they’re the ones making the claim, the onus probandi lies with them.

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duxup
>The Wall Street Journal story omits important factual details, including the
fact that AMD put significant protections in place to protect its intellectual
property (IP) and prevent valuable IP from being misused or reverse engineered
to develop future generations of processors.

Without knowing what those protections are, I'm not sure we have learned much.

Also the US government not objecting, I'm not sure changes the gist of the
story does it?

~~~
unethical_ban
Eh, the lean of the article and the comments on the original HN thread were
knocking AMD for it as if they were going against American interests by being
successfully bullied by China into giving up valuable IP.

AMD is saying that a) the IP was not of the highest value or performance, and
b) it's unlikely to go against American national security interests when DoC
and DoJ both give explicit sign-off. Remember too that this was in the Obama
era, when the likelihood of sailing the country down a river for $$$ was
lower.

~~~
zaroth
I think you’ve got it backward. The likelihood is that the Obama
administration treated China more like an ally and less as a hostile power
than Trump has treated them.

~~~
addicted
Obama spent a lot of political and reputational capital on the TPP. The only
purpose of TPP was to counteract China. I think it would be very surprising if
they were treating China as an ally.

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rasz
Intel did (probably forced by recent at the time $1B Qualcomm penalty in
China) the very same thing with Atom IP, twice!

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/8061/this-is-huge-intel-
enter...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/8061/this-is-huge-intel-enters-
strategic-agreement-with-chinese-soc-maker-rockchip)

[http://linuxgizmos.com/intel-invests-1-5-billion-in-
chinese-...](http://linuxgizmos.com/intel-invests-1-5-billion-in-chinese-chip-
designers/)

Not only Intel gave away its CPU IP, it also "invested" $1.5B in Tsinghua
Unigroup. Whats more last year they shared 5G modem IP with Unisoc, part of
Tsinghua Unigroup holding.

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aristophenes
My understanding of the structure of the arrangement when I first heard about
it was that it was designed to _not_ transfer IP, but to allow China to make
their own chip, in a manner of speaking, without actually having the important
IP. Even ignoring national obligations, it would just be bad business to hand
that over.

"AMD put significant protections in place to protect its intellectual property
(IP) and prevent valuable IP from being misused or reverse engineered to
develop future generations of processors."

That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if they got the IP anyway, just that
wasn't the intention. AMD CEO Lisa Su made some comments a few weeks ago that
the joint venture was already dead in the water and was just for one project
only. I get the feeling AMD wasn't too happy about the way it all turned out.

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m3kw9
Transferring lower speed tech still could be a huge jump from what China had,
the main point is architecture is hard to put a value to it. For what is
known, maybe slower means lowering the hertz

~~~
strawberryfan
> "could be a huge jump" ... "maybe slower means lowering the hertz"

This is so painfully obvious it's sad that it has to be said out loud. There
is no credible information about exactly what AMD means when they claim lower
performance. Nothing meaningful is said about the nature of their
'protections.' And the fact that everything was supposedly blessed by all the
various US government TLAs under the Obama administration is almost a
confirmation of the WSJ lede; that this was yet another backdoor sellout of US
tech to China.

~~~
simion314
>that this was yet another backdoor sellout of US tech to China

what does this mean? It does not seem to be something secret or illegal.

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mizzack
I'm sure the timing of this exposé (of a years-old story) has nothing to do
with AMD's imminent release of a product that will seriously threaten if not
outright beat Intel for years to come.

FUD

~~~
duxup
There's got to be a law or something where for a given thread there is some
user who has a conspiracy theory about it.

~~~
mizzack
Conspiracies, eh

[https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49](https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp).

Full disclosure, I'm long $AMD ;)

~~~
duxup
Unless I'm misunderstanding aren't you just proving the point / following the
usual example of proof people give of a conspiracy?

Every conspiracy claim has some related story people point to and draw a line
from.

The claim is that the article was FUD.

The fact that companies who are competitors can compete fiercely doesn't prove
anything.

~~~
mizzack
Sure, saying there are ulterior motives to this story is a conspiracy theory.
Without, say, video evidence of the author getting handed a bag of money by
Bob Swan you're free to dismissively label it as such.

Without more information we're left with:

\- Everything in the WSJ article was known years ago.

\- AMD is a week away from likely taking the x86 performance crown from Intel
in nearly every metric.

\- The last time this happened, Intel engaged in outright illegal non-
competitive behavior to preserve market share.

>It's like what Lenin said... you look for the person who will benefit, and,
uh, uh... You know what I'm trying to say...

~~~
duxup
Couldn't you also argue that any bad news about say a politician that comes
out would be a conspiracy too as that would be a benefit to someone...?

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microcolonel
This was my impression from the beginning, but I'm glad to hear it directly
from AMD.

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georgeburdell
AMD “laundered” IP through Chinese partnerships. The fact that the legal
goalposts have moved since their partnership began does not absolve them of
this fact. If China suddenly becomes massively more capable in X86 CPU’s, it
will be obvious why

