China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in government computers: Report
channelnewsasia.com
channelnewsasia.com
It seems completely unreasonable to me that one pillar of modern society has to be bought from USA or China and doesn't have a locally sourced alternative...
The US is hardly the aggressor on this one. They’ve simply been taking advantage of American greed for several decades and it’s finally catching up to them.
And they see a locally-owned social network that can be repurposed for government surveillance/control as a strategic priority.
Facebook obeying the rules today is less important than Facebook being compliant with (and quiet about) whatever edict is handed down next year.
Zuckerberg himself said in his 2019 speech that they don't operate in China because "we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there." American tech companies absolutely can operate in China if they agree to abide by local censorship rules (like Bing is doing for China, like Google was going to do with Dragonfly, or like YouTube is doing for India). Facebook also has a substantial ad business in China [1]
> And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company.
According to the Department of Commerce (https://www.export.gov/apex/article2?id=China-Establishing-a...),
> A large majority of new foreign investments in China are WFOEs [wholly foreign owned enterprises], rather than JVs. As Chinese legal entities, WFOEs experience greater independence than ROs, are allowed exclusive control over carrying out business activities while abiding by Chinese law and are granted intellectual and technological rights.
Also (https://arc-group.com/china-company-setup/):
> WFOE refers to a limited liability company that is 100% invested, owned by foreign investors, and independently operated. Almost 60% of foreign-owned companies are WFOEs, making it the most adopted business type. Famous multinational companies such as Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and General Electric are all examples of WFOEs.
[1] > Facebook sells more than $5 billion a year worth of ad space to Chinese businesses and government agencies looking to promote their messages abroad, analysts estimate. That makes China Facebook's biggest country for revenue after the United States, which delivered $24.1 billion in advertising sales in 2018 (https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/07/facebook-makes-a-new-ad-...)
This includes Chinese national security law which is far more invasive than the US law. The party can order a company to do anything they want, or make any physical places they want available to them, and everything is kept under permanent gag order.
> By using NSLs, the FBI can directly order companies to turn over information about their customers and then gag the companies from telling anyone that they did so. Because the process is secret, and because even the companies can’t tell if specific NSLs violate the law, the process is ripe for abuse.
> This includes Chinese national security law which is far more invasive than the US law
Does anyone have links and translations or shall we all just conjecture in a fact free way? All the above might be true or might not, but there isn’t a way to evaluate the claims.
Your information is out of date. This has been progressively phased out over the last 30 years, and is no longer required in most industries. Just to give you an example, Tesla fully owns its operations in China.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805362
China is also beating the living daylights out of everyone else on TPC benchmarks. It seems like western software firms don't care anymore.
https://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results5.asp?print=fal...
https://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results5.asp?resu...
I think PCI attached NAND promised to (and did) vastly reduce the cost of the hardware, because the test is pretty well IOPs-bound, but they were still very expensive, and interest had already been waning, so it didn't turn that around.
Short term, you may annoy them for while, but you better use that time wisely, long term, your embargo may be the forcing function that makes them even more advanced.
Granted, there may not be other politically palatable options available, but it's nonetheless risky.
The Loongsons or Kirins may be not a huge threat now, but think of Japan in the 20th century, where it turned from barely competent, almost rural country to a tech powerhouse in a few decades.
I read this tit for tat behavior as proof that the US embargoes may end up just making their own companies less competitive.
Expect the same thing to happen to China. If they can avoid another violent revolution, that is.
What if giant corporations isn’t the metric to measure success?
Giant corporations don't actually innovate much, the thing about them is that they can extract money from the society without doing much innovation. They are bean counters. Having the biggest bean counters isn't as cool as a TOP100 lists imply. If you read closely, you will notice that TOP100 lists are curated by some bean counting metrics, not innovation or anything like that. TOP100 by capital is where innovation goes to die. The best they can do is to buy startups and try to stay relevant when actual inventors invents stuff.
[0]:https://youtu.be/W2J0pRJSToU?t=373
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S3H0DKntNw
Maybe the steam will run out in 20 years due to demographics and they sink to the bottom of the ocean. Maybe Xi Jinping really did mess up taking over as supreme leader and we will see the consequences play out in the next 20 years. However, those 20 years will still be absolute hell for the US and their allies (lets be honest the US is the only real player). They may very well drag the US down to the bottom of the ocean with them by outclassing them at literally everything. The US is not some perfectly run paradise and it has severe issues that it did not have in the last challenge to its supremacy. We will see how things turn out.
Anyone who thinks CPUs allegedly on par with 10th gen Intel (or even a 14600K?!) and practical implementations of 7nm nodes are not huge threats is, sincerely, fucking delusional.
And assuming the claims are hot air and they're more on par with 6th gen Intel or thereabouts, anyone who thinks that's not a huge threat is, sincerely, still fucking delusional.
I think a lot of people, including those who really should know better, aren't realizing just how much processing horsepower even 6th gen Intel really has.
Of course, if those people also don't consider China a hostile in the first place, then I will grant their logic would make sense.
Though I found this post from last month https://bbs.chinauos.com/phone/zh/post/17586 where someone complains that UOS isn't updating to Loongson ABI2.0 quickly enough.
That's pretty good, especially for office work.
More players more competition, pick your poison.
Maybe I'm just too negative?
Pinduoduo got banned by Android as malware (in the US their app is Temu). As far as I know that is exceedingly rare
So, just like now?
But that actual root (complete with a networking stack etc.) backdoor (sorry: that amazing feature allowing updates we-swear-its-not-a-backdoor) is running the Minix OS on an... Intel chip?
So if they ban Intel chips for government use, technically they also ban all these backdoored (sorry, "upgradable") mobos too no!?
The motherboard (and associated UEFI/BIOS bits) is responsible for bootstrapping the Secure Boot process, it holds the keys that are used to verify the boot loader etc, which then chain-loads into a signed initramfs and kernel which then would normally decrypt and authenticate the filesystem.
This chain of trust only works forwards. If you pwn any link in that chain then everything forward of it is now untrusted. Thus compromising the actual root, i.e the UEFI/BIOS firmware is the ultimate hack. Especially if it can be done persistently and without detection.
Now for a normal desktop this doesn't really matter but on something like an EV (basically computer on wheels in Tesla's case atleast) then it really matters. High value military computers wouldn't be much different in this respect.
https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%2026%20pre...
This is like banning the internet for Teenagers. It’s not gonna work.
I made a pretty in-depth comment chain about this a couple weeks ago [0] and used to be a researcher in the space (both from a policymaking and technical standpoint)
Their goal is not to prevent regular people from using those chips. This rule does nothing to stop ordinary Chinese from using anything in fact.
Their goal is to route billions, over time hundreds of billions actually, to their own chipmakers while those chipmakers develop their capabilities with MIPS and ARM architectures.
This also further deepens Chinese dependence on the government which means the government’s on the hook for more things.
And the way the Chinese government is doing it they’re on the hook on both sides, both on the supply and demand side.
The other issue is that hundreds of billions is peanuts compared to free market and global governmental investment.
It’s akin to the US government saying they’re going to develop their own operating systems and architectures via subcontractors. Most people would assume it’s doomed instantly.
I sort of expect this is window dressing and isn’t practically meaningful. Telling an entire mega-enterprise like a major nations bureaucracy to somehow get all their software and processes onto a bespoke architecture and operating system is absurd. The software ecosystem doesn’t exist, and the existing software used today obviously doesn’t run on the new stack. If they actually enforced this processes would need to degenerate to paper trails for a decade or more as everything is either cross compiled and debugged or rewritten from scratch.
That seems absurdly unlikely.
You could take their phones, right now, plug in a keyboard and monitor and call it a workstation.
Yes, there's a lot of software outside that box but quite a lot in it, we're not talking about the soviets starting from first principles.
> In China it’s next level.
And yet, somehow, China gets things done and the USA doesn't.
I honestly don't know how much corruption goes on and how much grifting there is in those processes, but their infrastructure, manufacturing, and overall tech are literally next level compared to America.
I have no worries they'll achieve their goal of CPU independence.
Because graft and corruption works - look at the rise of fabrication in China despite just about every single vendor other than SMIC or YMTC collapsing due to misappropriation of funds and embezzlement (eg. Tsinghua Unigroup)
The American military procurement system is extremely ossified by regulations made in the aftermath of the 1980s-90s procurement corruption scandals [0]
Ironically, the US holds its lawmakers to a higher standard around graft than those in peer countries like France (Chirac, de Villipen, Mitterand), Israel (Netanyahu, Deri), Germany (Von der Leyden, Scholz), Canada (Bombardier, LaValle), or the UK (Johnson, Sunak), let alone countries like China.
This has lead to compliance overload which severely narrows down the potential pool of vendors.
For example, on the cybersecurity side - no startup even attempts to become FedRAMP certified until they are at Series E or above, as it's a multi-year process that swamps your platform and development team, and costs around $7-10M ime.
Yet FedRAMP is nowhere near as painful as other procurement and compliance systems that other parts of the Defense industry need to face.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-we...
The flight of foreign investment out of China is going to be sobering as it accelerates faster and faster. The Silk Road projects are bankrupt, the real estate bubble is finally popping, etc. My real worry is the upcoming instability leads to military adventurism.
> in government computers
Seems like a pretty achievable target. The US does this same thing at even larger scales for materials used in federal construction projects—the contractors are responsible for ensuring that (almost?) all materials are sourced from the US and are required to provide documentation to prove it. If the US can do it for everything in a building down to the bolts and screws, I have little doubt that China can figure it out for CPUs.
> > in government computers
That's the rub. In a country where the ruling party has a significant stake in most core 'private' enterprises, the line between government and non-government is very blurry. Presumably someone in the Chinese government has an opinion on where this line is, or should be, drawn.
Regardless the simplest way to protect ourselves is major shift into whitelist only network allowance
You could argue that Spectre, etc. are part of that, but I don't think that is the case.
This is just retaliation because of all the Taiwan crap, but more importantly, it does not matter as much as many folks think.
One book I was reading “Secrets of a Cybersecurity architect” by Brook S.E Shoenfield stated that security starts at the physical port and all hardware must go through integrity checks before it can be used.
If my memory servers me right he was one of NSAs first cyber warfare and security architects.
I also have retired family that was SVP of Engineering at a major telecom and he said this is a practice they had to implement as well because backbone routers would go missing for three days during shipping and just show up with no excuses for the delay.
The book is worth a glance, i never finished but it’s pretty insightful.
Additionally, on podcast i will never remember, China circumvents the banned entities list by stealthy acquiring approved chip manufactures and not rebranding, and new ownership adds backdoor into the chips.
But is that someone somewhere only part of the NSA or its Chinese equivalent?
It makes me think of the TriangleDB iPhone exploit.
I don't think anyone could have realistically known that those MMIO opcodes were there, without being part of the actual CPU design team.
https://securelist.com/operation-triangulation-the-last-hard...
>The exploit targets Apple A12–A16 Bionic SoCs, targeting unknown MMIO blocks of registers that are located at the following addresses: 0x206040000, 0x206140000, and 0x206150000.
>The prompted me to try something. I checked different device tree files for different devices and different firmware files: no luck. I checked publicly available source code: no luck. I checked the kernel images, kernel extensions, iboot, and coprocessor firmware in search of a direct reference to these addresses: nothing.
>How could it be that that the exploit used MMIOs that were not used by the firmware? How did the attackers find out about them? What peripheral device(s) do these MMIO addresses belong to
I believe it's very easy nowadays to release undetectably vulnerable devices.
This is basically targeting AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon product lines, both of which already can't be sold to the Chinese government due to existing DoD and DoC sanctions.
Basically, it's just PR.
I believe they can still do business there, just not sell cards above a (likely somewhat arbitrary) level of performance.
There is a Chinese market RTX4090 they recently released for example. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-reportedly-creating...
"That's not productive," Raimondo said. "I am telling you if you redesign a chip around a particular cutline that enables them to do AI, I am going to control it the very next day." [0]
Also, it's moreso about the buyers and use case. If it can be used for cutting edge simulations related applications, it will absolutely get controlled.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-abou...
>U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, speaking in an interview with Reuters on Monday, said Nvidia "can, will and should sell AI chips to China because most AI chips will be for commercial applications."
China doesn't need to do anything to win this New Cold War, we (the US) will lose of our own accord.
> "What we cannot allow them to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models," she added
The Lovelace line is on the newer end, though the RTX4090 is more commercial driven in usecases.
They aren't selling the "most sophisticated, highest-processing power" chips, but they are (and rightfully so given the law) selling sophisticated, high-processing power chips.
When we're beating around the bush refusing to not sell to China while they go and do the deed wholesale on their side, it's a foregone conclusion who is winning this New Cold War and whether it's worth waging it (for us) at all.
Also, it's been well over 24 hours since ComSec gave that "the very next day" statement.
I was "Doing AI" on a $300 laptop in 2013. (Running Dragon Naturally Speaking.)
Even if the Chinese CPU has half the performance of Intel, it will be more productive than an i7 burdened with Windows 11 and corporate trashware. The Chinese government runs Linux.
It's not great. If you're an information worker from 15 years ago, then sure, this thing has a lot of power to spare for... Office.
You can buy one too, for only $79: https://www.newegg.com/p/1VK-01Z8-00004?Item=9SIAZN1FNJ9468
But based on the discussions here of people using decade-old machines as daily drivers (including me), for undemanding workloads they may be just fine --- software inefficiency is a big factor, after all. It'd be amusing if this situation causes Chinese software to become more efficient as a result.
RISC-V is a good option though but only for servers I think