
US blocks Intel from selling Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputer projects - fspeech
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2908692/us-blocks-intel-from-selling-xeon-chips-to-chinese-supercomputer-projects.html
======
ComputerGuru
Big discussion already on HN from just yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9349116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9349116)

~~~
fspeech
Thanks for the link. Didn't see that one before submitting this.

------
TheMagicHorsey
This is a big banner ad for the US State Department that says in 100 point
font, we are too stupid to figure out ways to actually effectively constrain
our enemies, so we will settle for symbolic gestures that will screw American
commercial interests, and accomplish nothing.

Stupidity of the highest order. Xeon chips can be sourced by using an
intermediary that orders them for some other "legitimate" use. E.g., you go
find some company in Germany that makes servers for data centers, and order X
amount of Xeon servers from them through an intermediary.

There is no way to stop your adversaries from getting commodities that go into
the general flow of commerce. The fact that the US State Department does this
indicates that they don't understand the way the world works, more than
anything else.

~~~
transfire
> constrain our enemies

Well there is problem el numero uno, seeing everyone as an _enemy_.

~~~
cmelbye
They are now actively sponsoring attacks against private corporations that
(indirectly) assist Chinese citizens in circumventing blanket information
censorship imposed by the government. I'm not a fan of making enemies either,
but that sure doesn't sound friendly to me.

------
ryan-c
Title is misleading, the action taken prevents _all_ US companies from selling
them a wide range of technology products.

~~~
fspeech
What other components in their supercomputers require end user licensing and
are exclusively supplied by US companies?

~~~
colechristensen
I believe it is somewhat of a poison pill, pick one:

* Don't do business in the U.S.

* Don't sell certain high technology assets to non-allied foreign powers.

In a similar theme, Swiss banks are free to practice as much secrecy as they
want but _only_ if they keep their business out of the United States. They
haven't been and as such the justice department has been smashing them with
billion dollar fines for tax evasion and money laundering. Several hundred
years old banks have been forced to close because of this.

~~~
fspeech
"End-Use control" is burdensome on any high volume commodity product. Without
requiring end-use control there is no stopping a middleman outside of US reach
from selling on the products to someone else. This is different from banking
as we are talking about commodity parts here. For example, Iranian nuclear
enrichment plants allegedly used Siemens controllers, c.f. Stuxnet.

------
minthd
The OpenPower alliance has some Chinese companies who develop chips and
servers using the IBM IP, and there would be servers released at Q2-2015. And
the Chinese government is encouraging Chinese companies to use that
architecture.

This current move might deter the Chinese from using the OpenPower and
counting on that design, because it might have similar restrictions in the
future, although it's hard to tell how big of an impact such restrictions
would have on IP.

And on the other hand, in the context of the Chinese computing shift, the u.s.
or intel don't really lose much from this move.

BTW: Could china seriously compete(and take large shares) in the cloud/hosting
businesses using servers installed in china, assuming hw and power is
cheaper,given the latency limitation ?

------
grandalf
Can anyone frame this in terms of how much more money China will have to spend
to build the equivalent cluster using non-Xeon CPUs?

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
It would probably be cheaper with AMD CPUs, slightly more IBM/Power. It won't
be a financial inconvenience. But, why would they need to use a different CPU?
They shouldn't have any trouble sourcing Xeon processors despite the "ban".

FYI, The Chinese already own the #1 spot. (at least of the supers that are
known about).
[http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/11/](http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/11/)

