Comment by intheknow12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intheknow12 | Hacker News Reader

I have worked for certain major semiconductor companies. At least two of them.

The question is not “Why did AMD hand over all its IP to China,” the question is “Why did our incompetent government allow this to happen and why did they turn a blind eye to the strong arming that was going on?”

A further question is: “Why did only some (always smaller) tech companies fork over the IP while very large ones did not?”

Let me tell you a story about a fab in a distant country that begins with a C. The rumor was that it was a very expensive server fab. One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing. They locked down the factory for 48 hours and brought in a search team, scoured the building from bottom to top and then found nothing.

Then, as if by magic, the wafer appeared three feet away from where it went missing. Industrial espionage. And that is what you get when you are big.

What happens when you are small? They put a gun to your head (metaphorically) and say “Split off a company and hand it over to entities controlled by the Chinese government. All your IP will be shared with them. They will own the market in China and send you a royalty check and have the ability to modify your IP to build custom products. If you don’t like it, fuck off, no China for you.”

What lazy, incompetent and useless western journalists have been shockingly non curious about is why certain companies like Microsoft and Apple magically don’t seem to get this treatment.

It is almost as though....some other arrangement was getting made. No lazy western journalists to my knowledge have yet bothered to investigate why it is that Intel, Microsoft etc have not been forced to do these IP sharing agreements while AMD and others have.

One day, Lazy western journalists might be curious and get off their asses from Covering trump but somehow I doubt it.

Blaming AMD for “handing over the keys” is fucking stupid. It is the United States government’s lack of a spinal cord that is the problem. These companies had no choice. Either play the game or get shut out of the market.

Bad journalism, everywhere along with a lack of curiosity.

> Microsoft etc have not been forced to do these IP sharing agreements

Microsoft regularly shares Windows source code with foreign governments for them to inspect.

From 2003 https://www.infoworld.com/article/2681548/china-gets-access-...

That seems like the same sort of difference between source available and free software. Seems like a minute difference from a cursory glance, but it turns out the graph of dependencies and derived works is more important than the the code itself.

That and software can be easily decompiled. It's not that hard if you really want to know how something works. I learnt enough asm to modify a modern app that was essential to my work flow but had been abandoned by the developers. It didn't take me that long to learn.

A nation state can easily do it if they want. The US govt (NSA) has even devloped a reverse engineering tool and open sourced it.

Sure, but the USSR just openly ran modified versions of OS/360. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM China certainly has the capability to do the same to all of Microsoft's products. It's not a fundamental part of software that China isn't bilking Microsoft blazenly, there's something deeper going on.

Perhaps Apple too.

"Apple hasn’t provided any information on the matter and did not respond to requests for comment. But analysts said the most likely interpretation is that the company is giving Beijing access to its operating system source code in return for being able to continue to do business in China—arguably Apple’s most important market, but one that has been imperiled by regulatory obstacles"

https://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese...

Darwin is already open source, albeit Apple does a code dump every few years iirc: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

Darwin is just one piece of the puzzle. macOS is much more than it's kernel.

Darwin doesn't even remotely resemble MacOS. It's the kernel and open-sourced user-land components. It resembles(but is not at all) a very old FreeBSD-ish system if loaded.

Just out of curiosity, what else if not the kernel would be interesting to copy from MacOS? I use a Mac but just don't have the inclination to learn about it under the hood (unlike Linux). Besides the various apps they include and the graphical / window system, I can think of LaunchD, drivers, but not much more that would be worth a lot to China.

Good high-level mental mode, but it's not a clean separation like that.

Think Open Source Android vs. Google's Android, or Chromium vs. Chrome. It's not just dragging and dropping some UI libraries on top. There's a ton of glue, and sticking shims into non-obvious places that make a lot of the magic happen.

The Darwin kernel is worthless because any free Unix is better. The graphical stuff is the whole reason macOS exists.

There's very little special sauce in an operating system; at least, it's hard to hide state of the art techniques in one. Bleeding-edge hardware is chock full of trade secrets which are hard to simply copy.

Absolving AMD -- who actively made the choices in this case to pursue a market that they certainly didn't need to chase, and which would certainly end up biting them in the medium term -- while blaming "lazy western journalists", is simply incredible. How in the world it became the fault of journalists is an incredible stretch. The Trump bit makes your motivation suspect.

The bit about big versus small -- China pulls the same tact with virtually all foreign companies, even making Apple and others play the China game. Intel was expressly forbidden by congress of sell or licensing server chips in China, and AMD went in to try to eek a small profit in the void.

> One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing.

I assume you mean the mask set...

I think the original commenter was missing some key nuts and bolts in his comment.

My thoughts exactly.

Can you elaborate?

Nah, I can see a wafer, pre-etcing or soemthing, being way more valuable than a mask set. We as digital logicians are way more at the grace of the process/foundary engineers than we'd like to admit.

Also, you can steal important masks without anything being missing.

If I were going to steal someone's IP and make unlicensed copies, I'd put a bit more effort in upfront and steal the systemverilog source code. Should be easy enough to do - send someone to work in the IT department responsible for the source code management system - as well as having access to all the code, they'll have knowledge of what protections are in place.

There's def cool stuff to learn from at each step, including the masks vs the RTL. That was the value add of Intrinsity for instance.

On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, the investment in the physical design itself is quite significant at the high end, and you can't see that from the HDL source. Frankly, if you're going to steal, you'd want to steal both.

> One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing.

LOL sorry but a wafer isn't worth billions, single digits millions, maybe 10-20 million tops

You have an interesting insight.

Your point about journalists. Maybe it's fair. Maybe they don't know what to look for or how to get/report it.

You seem to have an inside track. Why not reach out to some of them anonymously and do a public service?

I can recommend a few very good ones who would be interested if you don't know some already.

Agreed. While I agree with OP's criticism of journalists, even as a developer with an interest in low-level programming I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough in what is ultimately an extremely niche field. I understand what all of the components are when reading about them, but know nothing about the manufacturing process, and even less about the politics that goes on. If you know something, enlighten the right people. It might be asking too much to expect people to figure this out on their own.

It's probably the fault of both engineers and journalists.

Most journalists lack curiosity, most engineers lack the ability to teach things to anyone who is tech-ignorant.

The govt, rightly so, doesn't interfere with every single private deal. While the US govt is wising up to the threat China poses to the West and is blocking IP xfer, it's a balance that needs to be struck.

The US doesn't have China's system of rigid state control, and that's a good thing.

But I think there actually are many similarities between China and US. China doesn't allow some Western companies to do business in their country, but US is also banning some Chinese and Russian companies without even a court decision, just because some guy from Trump's administration have decided so. And if we compare the volume of international sanctions imposed by both countries, China will not be a winner here.

The U.S. has a better tactical position in the tariff war, but people exaggerate how dependent China is on exports to the U.S. Exports account for less than 20% of China's GDP and have been steadily declining for over a decade; exports accounts for more than 12% of U.S. GDP and have been slowly increasing.

Conservative pundits are living in the 1990s. One reason Obama had to sideline hawks to cut the Iran nuclear deal is because China (among some other countries) made it clear that they were about to walk away from sanctions with Iran unless the U.S. sat down to hammer out a nuclear deal independent of Iran's missile programs. And as Trump's trade war has proven, China was fully prepared to make good on that threat.

Here's a story from yesterday which explains why Beijing made HK Chief Executive Lam apologize to Hong Kong protesters:

  https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Xi-reverses-Hong-Kong-policy-with-Alibaba-and-North-Korea-in-mind

TL;DR: Beijing is starting to dig in for the long-haul, changing their domestic political strategies with the expectation that they'll need to cut their U.S. export exposure sooner rather than later. Part of that is relaxing their stance toward Hong Kong. (Think about it: they made Lam apologize. That's not only a huge loss of face to her and her administration but to Beijing, and in the calculus of Chinese politics a not insignificant threat to CPC's power.)

Beijing has been carefully managing China's transition to a domestic, consumption-oriented economy since the aughts (2000s). That's the background to the corporate espionage and two steps forward, one step back trade liberalization. Now they're having to accelerate that process; it's not what they wanted, but they're fully prepared to do it over caving to U.S. demands. They're making concessions, just ones that strengthen their tactical position in the tariff war and their long-term strategic position. In effect they're doubling down--the anti-competitive behavior was always a means to an end, and they're recommitting themselves to that end.

That U.S. demands are reasonable is beside the point. Long-term it's China with the winning hand. The irony is that it's the so-called realist conservatives, who proclaim that might makes right is a fact of nature, that fail to see that according their own rules their strategy is doomed to fail.

The U.S. is entering a phase, much like the U.K. before it, of managing its fall from power. If done well (better than the U.K. managed, not they they did an especially bad job of it), the U.S. can minimize the loss of relative strength and maximize its absolute strength, improving the lot of the world in the process. But if we don't accept this basic fact and instead overplay our hand, the consequences will be devastating relative to the best possible outcome--far less relative strength and, at best, treading water in terms of domestic wealth. Right now we're literally hastening our own demise--we're accelerating our descent by setting the stage to prove yet again (after Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, etc) our increasing impotence while rapidly depleting the goodwill, structural leverage, and other resources needed to manage the decline.

None of these points are novel, nor even (IMO) seriously contentious. With sober consideration they're all fairly self-evident. But there's a ton of motivated thinking going on in the U.S. right now.

Well written. And I agree with you. But...

> the U.S. can minimize the loss of relative strength and maximize its absolute strength

It's not an optimization problem that can be neatly solved. It going to be very chaotic. While the train tracks of where the story goes have been laid out, what happens on the train is mostly madness.

Just going to say, most optimization problems don't have neat solutions.

This is called Joint Venture (JV) and is a common practice in Semicon. You can search Qualcomm and Intel, they also do this with china.

So basically you want US companies and economy to be controlled by the government to the same extent that Chinas companies are? Where the government needs to approve every deal with foreign suppliers and manufacturers?

That sounds very much how our socialist economy worked, glad you've decided to try the same approach we did from 1945-1990. Maybe THIS TIME it'll actually perform better than the very successful free markets of 20th century. ;)

Seriously - the most successful US companies are global corporations which have major presence in EMEA and APAC markets. They also have rather large control over communications and news fields. What do you think will happen in those non-US markets if those corporations start to be a vessel for American propaganda and foreign policy bullying? How long do you think it'll take before they find themselves banned and pushed out of non-US markets?

They don't have to make propaganda because before them first came the IMF OR the US army.

> So basically you want US companies and economy to be controlled by the government to the same extent that Chinas companies are? Where the government needs to approve every deal with foreign suppliers and manufacturers?

It's not the companies that are the problem, it's the requirements being imposed on them by foreign governments. The failure is on the part of the US government in not protecting US companies from unreasonable technology transfer requirements etc.

> The failure is on the part of the US government in not protecting US companies from unreasonable technology transfer requirements etc.

Maybe foreigners do not think it's unreasonable ?

Realpolitik international relations. Different parties having different interests doesn't mean there is nothing the US government can do to achieve better conditions for US companies.

> there is nothing the US government can do to achieve better conditions for US companies.

Are you sure about that ? The US already provides huge help to US companies at the determinant to other countries.

No technology transfer would mean higher tariff from East Asia.

China wont stop until their GDP per capita matches that of Japan / South Korea.

It is only China that forces IP theft, though

And why would foreign governments agree to that while still tolerating US companies? Especially when the power blocks like EU have an option to side with China - especially after attacks from Trump administration?

What gain does the US think to get here except having everything spiral into regressive and dangerous pre-WW1 mercantilism?

What would the EU gain diplomaticaly also individual countries woud do this.

You could argue that the UK would side with India and project power there assuming we actually get our carriers out there.

> So basically you want US companies and economy to be controlled by the government to the same extent that Chinas companies are? Where the government needs to approve every deal with foreign suppliers and manufacturers?

I don't think that sales volume is the only metric to be taken into consideration here. No matter what degree of culpability you assign to each party, the US and China are countries with an increasing level of hostility towards one another. Why should America permit what are ostensibly American companies from openly trading high technology with an increasingly hostile nation? Especially technology which is of military significance. I'm sure there were similar restrictions in place during the Cold War. I'm not advocating that the west returns to similar policies, but this might be the direction that we're forced to progress in for our wellbeing's sake.

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