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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

The page says "Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China", but other sources suggest that their cores are derived from Centaur microarchitecture. Anyone know what the truth is on this?

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VIA bought Centaur, so you can argue that, tenuously. VIA is a Taiwanese company. Some people insist that being Taiwanese is being Chinese.

Even granting the considerable stretch that the VIA acquisition somehow renders part of Austin "within China" (I'm reminded here of the Babylon 5 episode "Day of the Dead"), I have my doubts that they'd throw away all pre-acquisition IP just to be able to make this claim. I guess they might have done so regardless to develop something with a newer workflow (e.g. for better verification), but my understanding is that it's not unusual to ship ~20-year-old HDL cores (e.g. UARTs) that are just synthesized with different gate libraries.

> I have my doubts that they'd throw away all pre-acquisition IP just to be able to make this claim

China doesn't seem to be above claiming that they "domestically developed" technology that they really acquired from foreigners. An example I'm aware if is China's "home grown" 3G cellular protocol called TD-SCDMA. It was really a failed European standards proposal from Siemens, but passed off as an indigenous Chinese development for prestige reasons.

See https://www.samizdata.net/2012/06/here-is-the-rac/

But if you go back far enough, that tech actually came from Cyrix, an American company. I highly doubt they rewrote everything.

Taiwan insist it's Chinese. Its government claims to be the rightful government of the whole of China.

The People's Republic of China and the Republic of China both agree there is a single China which includes Taiwan. They differ over who should govern it.

The new current Taiwanese administration has not confirm that the 1992 Consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Consensus

The Chinese government has been engaging in some saber rattling because of that.

Not all Taiwanese are pro republic of China. There is a huge split in Taiwan between mainlanders (post 1949) and natives (also descended from the mainland, just pre 1949).

Hans started moving to Taiwan in the 1600s, then you had that big influx as the Chinese Revolution wound down.

There's also Native Taiwanese - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples, they even make up about 2% of the population, I think they all want the Hans to pickup and leave their lands.

The native natives are more aligned with the KMT (ok, super aligned). The Hans before 1949 are mostly from Fujian, who are not known for being the most patriotic (and indeed, became dominant in overseas Chinese communities in SE Asia, NYC, and so on...). Post 1949 was the rich Chinese and KMT officials from everywhere escaping the communists, who also own much of the island's economy and want closer ties to China (so they can make more money).

The Republic of China probably agrees partly because waiving their territorial claims could trigger military action through China's Anti-Secession Law.

They say it has a new microarchitecture, pipeline reduced by 5 stages, new branch prediction, new support for multi-chip-modules, and new cache coherency protocol to support that.

It seems as much a ground up design as Zen.

http://www.eefocus.com/mcu-dsp/399906/r0

According to the official One China Policy the island of Taiwan is a province of China. So yeah, maybe it all depends what your definition of "China" is...

I believe this is just a bad translation from a popular Chinese propaganda (自主研发).

>"Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China"

Yes, just not that China, another one

Well, given the territorial claims, yes, kind of that one. It just depends which government you believe as to whether the island of Taiwan is occupied territory, or everything else in China is occupied territory.

And these are governments we're talking about, so, needless to say, both sides killed millions to make this happen. Not because those people that got killed worked for the other side or were doing anything at all (not even protesting most of them), but merely because they wanted to frighten the rest enough to not do anything against them.

One of the nicknames for one of the actions of the Taiwanese government was "the White terror" (death toll: at least 10000, there had been a protest march against them, so naturally ...), the mainland Chinese government had a policy that each little town had to have at least one public execution, and millions died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taiwan#Republic_of_...

It’s worth noting that while the government in Taiwan still officially claims all of China, the government is currently led by a president (Tsai Ing-wen) whose party does not whole-heartedly endorse that position.

Ya, see the difference between the DPP and KMT. Chiang Kai Shek’s legacy is also very dubious amongst many Taiwanese (especially in the DPP), who don’t align with the communists either (and let’s not get into Japan).

Whatever they claim, in the present time reality the RC (Taiwan) and the PRC are 2 distinct independent countries that are not going to re-unite any soon. "Believing" any of the 2 just doesn't make much sense.

Also, as far s I understand, the division has began as a conflict of 2 political parties - the leftists (CPC) and the rightists (Kuomintang) that has escalated into a civil war. And as the result each party now controls its part of what was once meant to be a single country and claims the right to rule both. What makes me curious is why can't 2 parties just control their parts the way they do in Taiwan and PRC but do it peacefully and without nonsensical claims when the people of one part are more sympathetic to one and the people of the other part are more sympathetic to the other. Why is it so important to have one party to rule them all, including those who doesn't want it?

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