> I see people -- including Chinese diaspora -- calling for banning Intel.
Is this feasible? There's not all that many other options for x86
Is this feasible? There's not all that many other options for x86
So what will happen instead? From what I've seen so far, China is careful with counterattacking US because they know the US is stronger. I think the govt will just issue an angry statement but do nothing concrete internationally, while continuing their domestic efforts of semiconductor development as they already have, and also continuing with restructuring Xinjiang's economy (i.e. replacing foreign customers with domestic customers, as happened with cotton)
Furthermore, what we're talking about here is replacing x86. There is indeed a joint venture with AMD, but at the end of the day x86 is still US intellectual property and thus susceptible to sanctions.
It would be a different matter if they decide to replace x86 wholesale with something else, e.g. ARM or RISC-V. That is certainly more feasible today than a decade ago, with Android being a major platform and no longer being constrained to just Windows. But it's probably still a large amount of effort.
I spent about €200,000 on AMD servers last year. They are performing better than Intel ones would have done at the same price, so it was a very easy decision.