I mean, we do the same thing, for the same reasons, with our government and defense procurement orders these days. This isn’t that weird. It’s only weird in that they’re clearly cutting themselves off from the best high-volume x86 CPU manufacturers that currently exist, but aside from that, the geopolitical and strategic calculus adds up.
Hey China I made you this sweet horse statue in the form of an x86 processor – You should put it in the town square to show it off and then all go to sleep…
x86 is dying, legacy processing. It’s all GPU’s and ARM processing now. Apple is leaning hard into it so they set themselves as a leader in AI in the future.
You very obviously don’t understand the truly enormous power of technical inertia.
Except a lot of infrastructure runs on legacy software. There’s stuff built on like windows 2000 that is still used by hospitals and governments.
There’s a lot of critical infrastructure running on Windows 3.1. A lot of very expensive machinery runs on proprietary software only released as x86 binaries, from autoclaves to MRI machines.
Oh, and here’s the fun part: Basically the only appeal Windows has is its legacy software support. ‘My games just work.’ ‘My software just runs.’ That wasn’t the case with the ARM editions of Windows, you couldn’t just run a .exe. So they either have to do emulation, which in most cases WINE under Linux works better, or lock you into their app store which is Apple but 1,000 times shittier.
You’re not wrong, but most of this legacy software runs on legacy hardware as well. Win 2k isn’t supported by most modern hardware
Which is why China is incentivizing people to switch to their ARM based OSes that run on Linux 4, I suppose
Gaming though. The gaming situation on non-x86 cpus is passable at best. AFAIK you can’t put a 4070ti in any non x86 system right now and have it work. Are there even any commercially available non-x86 systems that have pcie 16x slots?
The death of x86 is inevitable I just hope we can still play computer games on cheaper homebuilt systems afterwards because having to replace your entire system just to upgrade the integrated non upgradable gpu is no longer better or cheaper than consoles. I absolutely fucking doubt even indie developers, let alone others are going to downgrade graphics to let their games run on cheaper systems when this happens and everything becomes 10x more expensive.
AFAIK you can’t put a 4070ti in any non x86 system right now and have it work.
Try an AMD card, much better chances because open drivers. There definitely have been people who got dedicated GPUs to run on ARM boards via the not even a handful of pcie lanes meant for m.2 storage.
I wouldn’t be too sure about ARM because Qualcomm definitely is eyeing alternatives and other licensors might not exactly mind not being reliant on litigious bastards. That alternative is RISC-V. Most ARM licensors are making chips for products where apps don’t really care about the architecture, that is, Android.
To actually make a dent in the completely entrenched x86 market we’d need probably chips with dual insn decoders. I certainly wouldn’t put that past AMD they don’t like being fused to Intel at the hip.
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You’re getting down voted but in all honesty, you’re not wrong. All it takes is one x86/64 alternative to show the world that Intel and AMD aren’t the only players in the game. Apple did it with ARM and the m1 chip, now we’re hearing reports of Microsoft actually putting a real effort into ARM and making their own chips for AI instead of that half-assed Windows on ARM initiative. I for one love this competition, because that only benefits the consumers.
If x86 is going to die, Apple has to be defeated at all costs or else computers are going to become 10x expensive once they establish a monopoly. I hope someone starts making real progress in ARM system stuff. If they do away with expansion ports and make it so the gpu, ram, and cpu are all on one chip even on the competing non-x86 non-M1 systems then everything’s fucked though.
ARM computers are positively repugnant. This abobination of an architecture MUST be exterminated.
They’re not great, yet, but they’re pretty cheap and really small. They’ll probably get a lot better in the future though, remember the speed of x86 CPU’s was once measured in MgHZ. I remember my first P4 with one whole GgHZ of speed, before even dual core CPU’s.
This might just be for government computers, not the entire country - see https://www.ft.com/content/7bf0f79b-dea7-49fa-8253-f678d5acd64a
Still, the overall direction and intent is clear.
understandible given how the Americans are treating Huawei.
Only Chinese code is present, namely [lists three linux distros]
Linus Torvalds: *clears throat*
China Huawei’ing Linux
China bans Intel and AMD from government machines, the US blocked Huawei from the entirety of the US.
Unless I’m misreading the article Intel and AMD are banned for EVERYONE not just government.
That article is poorly written. This one is more informative. Since there’s a paywall, I’ll quote a few relevant parts:
"China has introduced new guidelines that will mean US microprocessors from Intel and AMD are phased out of government PCs and servers, as Beijing ramps up a campaign to replace foreign technology with homegrown solutions.
The stricter government procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options."
…
"Officials have begun following the new PC, laptop and server guidelines this year, after they were unveiled with little fanfare by the finance ministry and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on December 26. They order government agencies and party organs above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases. "
I mean, i get it. But i wish the world would just work together on everything and stop with the country bullshit. Imagine the stuff we could make if everyone worked together.
Brothers, brothers! We should be struggling together!
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I mean more Arm on Linux sounds dope to me I guess
I like the power conservation but I hate the “SoC”
Ampere CPUs use normal DIMMs, and don’t have integrated storage, like any other CPU. So you can have the best of both worlds (although idk about power conservation, they are efficient though).
SoCs exist primarily for power efficiency. Long external bus lines and their respective controllers are very power hungry.
Also, tightly coupled RAM reduces latency and eases cache size requirements.
This isn’t the case for everybody, but I’d wager the vast majority of people never upgrade their RAM independently of their CPU these days. There was probably a spike once 8GB became generally insufficient a few years ago, but I have a hard time imagining the same thing will happen with 16GB configs until it’s time to hop on the DDR5 train.
Well they probably know what they put in the CPUs they export to the US and Europe, so why would they?
Whatever that gets a RISC-V open source chip made i am supporting don’t care if its china or russia lets just hope this makes the giants follow along .
What bothers me is the kernel version. Only one OS is on Linux 5 while the rest are on Linux 4‽
A debian based dystopia, I like it
Seems like a continuation of the sad state of affairs for ARM chips. Most of the allowed chips are ARM based, and most companies making ARM chips never update their kernels
In a bizarre turn of events, it seems the reclusive nation of North Korea has finally succumbed to the intense chip envy brought on by China’s recent announcement of its approved CPU list. In an effort to keep pace with neighboring rivals, Kim Jong-un ordered the immediate development of a state-of-the-art microchip. And thus, ‘The Juche Chip’ was born - named after North Korea’s philosophy of self-reliance.
After months of hard work, North Korean engineers presented their masterpiece: a CPU so advanced, it can run MS-DOS smoothly on Windows ME. This revolutionary breakthrough in computing technology also boasts an impressive clock speed that’s roughly equivalent to the rate at which time moves inside a Pyongyang prison cell. With the Juche Chip, users will never have to worry about lagging, overheating or any other technical issues because their system will freeze before such problems could even arise.
Databases also make the list, and again nothing from Western devs made the cut. But Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB is mentioned, as is Tencent’s TDSQL and a handful of other made-in-China efforts.
That’s a big one.
Unless Chinese firms have been straight-up stealing trade secrets and code from the likes of Oracle and have produced such a blatant knock-off of their software that in any other country, they would have been sued out of existence, I can see a five week transition being messy-as-fuck.
Transitions to new database systems take months or even years to implement, not the 5 weeks mandated by the Chinese Communist Party. This is especially the case when you’re dealing with important stakeholder data, huge data volumes and/or statutory requirements like financial reporting.
100% someday they will use the approved CPU list to have only those with secure boot/locked bootloader enforcing only their approved operating systems too.
So, like our horrible cellphones
This is the best summary I could come up with:
AMD and Intel are not present on a list of processors approved by China’s Information Security Evaluation Center.
The x86 architecture does make the list, but only in chips made by Shanghai Zhaoxin Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd – which is minority-owned by Taiwan’s Via Technologies and holds a license to produce x86 processors.
The other approved chip shops make processors powered by Arm cores or, in the case of Loongson Technologies, the RISC-V architecture.
Second, the Financial Times found it over the weekend and reported that publication of the list accelerated efforts in China to replace Western tech and hardware with locally developed kit.
The FT chatted to some IT shops inside China and they confirmed that they’re phasing out items like PCs running Windows, because shop-at-home mandates have taken force.
Last week, authorities again called on web platforms to police more vigilantly the use of provocative typos and puns that can be construed as criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.
The original article contains 463 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Can’t even source their own chips. Need to buy from the real China, Taiwan.
China is a fucking joke.
Make RISC-V great again
Loongson is fully Chinese. Only the x86 chips have a Taiwan joint.
Yeah, only the most dominant, mature, and in-use instruction set.
When was the last time you ran a SPARC binary?
I was gonna say x64, but I just realized that that’s x86.
Anyways, none of these are SPARC either, and if they’re switching to another operating system, it seems logical for them to use ARM since Windows apps can’t run anyway
authorities again called on web platforms to police more vigilantly the use of provocative typos and puns that can be construed as criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.
Criticism? Jail. Puns? Jail. Spelling mistake? Believe it or not, jail. We have the highest literacy in the world. Because of jail.
I’m all for critiquing China where it makes sense but this just seems like the same national security measures the West has taken in the past (Huawei 5G anyone?)
It’s also defacto mandating that their CCP approved Spyware chips are in place
Spyware chips are far more problematic than just using boring old software. Why bother when you can just bundle the spyware into your own Linux distro?
Yeah! Can’t they just get Apple and Microsoft to postpone updates for exploit those vulnerabilities? Oh wait…
Hi, Europeans! This is a careful reminder to use Linux. Step away from yankee companies.
You’re getting downvoted but you are right, from a security standpoint Europe’s infrastructure is dangerously reliant on an increasingly unpredictable USA. The status quo was fine while Europe and the US agreed on pretty much every foreign policy but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the two blocks are slowly drifting in different directions. Eventually Europe’s reliance on US IT will become a problem.
It’s more like US guarantees are symbolic, at best. It should be obvious that Europeans don’t have jurisdiction in the US, and vice versa.
With the stance the US has against anything foreign, it becomes increasingly impossible to trust both their government bodies - and their software industry.
Like when people travel to the US, I recommend they get a new cheap throwaway smartphone, because the second you’re land on that US airport, you’re forced to give up all it’s data. Heck, even US citizens proper aren’t safe from the TSA.
None of the CPUs on that list contain Intel Management Engine. What gives China, you don’t want a CPU in your CPU?
