So what are all the chips being illegally brought into China being used for?
This is like banning the internet for Teenagers. It’s not gonna work.
This is like banning the internet for Teenagers. It’s not gonna work.
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.
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)