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.
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.
Yes, but watching whose order books suddenly expand in proportion to the size of the blocked channels provides intelligence about who those intermediaries might be, which is likely the real purpose.
Huh? Wouldn't it have been simpler just to have Intel give the information? Blocking US interests from selling the components to the Chinese super folks won't stop some other Chinese supplier from shifting them over there. It's not as though we're going to stop selling (or manufacturing) Xeons outside the continental US.
That's not what I meant. If you block the supercomputer center from buying Xeons directly, then seeing who else places orders to take up the slack for the project tells you something valuable about who has relationships with the Chinese defense establishment. It's not that we care about controlling access to Xeons, which are easy enough to buy, but that we'd like to understand Chinese defense procurement supply chains to a greater degree than we do.
ah no I recall receiving kit (a 300mb drive) back in the late 70's that came with a whole wodge of paperwork promising all sorts of penalties if we resold it to a number of other named states.
The same would apply today reselling things on the banned list to unapproved states.
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.