Intel and AMD shouldn't panic yet, but this Chinese vendor has repacked a Xeon CPU:
Jintide Montage might sound like the name of a punk group, but it's not. In fact, the Montage is an x86 processor with PrC (Pre-Check) and DSC (Dynamic Security Check) technologies that can be used in Jintide or other server platforms.
It shares common DNA with Intel, AMD and VIA and uses Skylake Xeon silicon at its core - and has already entered mass production.
According to the marketing materials, Jintide uses Tsinghua University's DSC technology to achieve "high-speed IO tracing, memory tracing and CPU behavioral checking via its built-in security check engine."
[...] In other words, expect it to be used for anything from website hosting to VPN and cloud storage.
From the available information, we can tell this is not a consumer processor and there's no Core CPU coming from Jintide any time soon. The Montage is also aimed exclusively at the Chinese market, perhaps extending to the country's close allies.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @07:40PM (12 children)
Isn't it how "built-in security check engine" translates from marketspeak?
In other words, expect it to be government-mandated for everyone in China and "the country's close allies" at first opportunity. Unless something more immediate like economic crash or civil war takes the corresponding regimes' attention off their shared wet dream of countrywide electronic concentration camp.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 26 2020, @07:58PM (9 children)
After all, there's nothing suspicious about the People's Republic of China putting out something called "PrC" technology.
That said, I'm sure that if the US were manufacturing these chips, there would be similar bugs in place for the NSA.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @08:45PM (8 children)
Obviously.
https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel [libreboot.org]
https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd [libreboot.org]
However, NSA and a chinese or russian commoner have negligibly little reason to care about each other. While conversely, the countries' ruling parties cannot stop meddling in every aspect of their subjects' life.
Even the citizens of the same country as NSA, still have less reason to care; last I heard, USA not only does not run concentration camps yet, but even sanctioned PRC for doing so.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @08:58PM (4 children)
》 last I heard, USA not only does not run concentration camps yet, but even sanctioned PRC for doing so.
Typical ignorant American... ask your Japanese-American friends about Owen's Valley, Manzanar, etc
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @09:01PM
Dorothea Lange even took photos of them for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @09:41PM
> Typical ignorant American... ask your Japanese-American friends about Owen's Valley, Manzanar, etc
Typical cheap propaganda bot. Ask your Russian bosses of GULAG.
Besides, no amount of last-century stuff gives the todays' rulers an indulgence for new atrocities. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @09:57PM
Ask your Muslim friend about the Xinjiang camps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @12:23AM
Who had up a Japanese Internment camp exhibit in their visitor center/trading post ~20-25 years ago to help shine light on the Japanese Americans plight (this was around when those '40k' repayment things were getting doled out) as well as how flexible the Federal government is in respect to Indian Reservation's sovereignity when they go and plunk internment camps involuntarily on native reservations rather than putting them on any of the millions of acres of BLM land the US government manages instead.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 26 2020, @09:12PM (1 child)
No, just the largest prison population in the world, plus all those immigration facilities where they've locked up some unknown number of kids forever for the heinous crimes of being brown, talking funny, and going someplace their parents forced them to go.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @11:34PM
larger than china.. well they tend to kill you first or just have more people. unless their prison numbers are as accurate as covid deaths
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Tuesday May 26 2020, @11:52PM
last I heard, USA not only does not run concentration camps yet, but even sanctioned PRC for doing so.
You got some catching up to do... Guess you haven't heard about their little Caribbean getaway... Samba macht frei...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by NPC-131072 on Wednesday May 27 2020, @12:03AM
YouTube may already be testing [theverge.com] these processors
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:02AM
so does "Intel Management Engine"
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @09:30PM (4 children)
How can these Chinamen just copy Intel's IP? And why is Israel suddenly so interested in what the PRC is up to?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @09:38PM
Nothing copied, from TFA:
The processor was born of an official partnership with Intel and is presented as a hardware security enhanced server CPU
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday May 26 2020, @09:52PM
Patents are nation level laws, so if China wanted to, it could just "nationalize" them. That doesn't seem to be what's happening here, but if it were there would be no grounds for complaint. The US has done that in the past. I believe that in some technical areas it still does it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:16AM (1 child)
While I can't find any reference to Israel in the article there is nothing sudden about Israel and China being interested in each others tech, Since way back in 1992 Israel has been trading high tech stuff with China. [nytimes.com]
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @03:17AM
》 While I can't find any reference to Israel in the article
Intel.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @03:09AM (1 child)
What do those even mean? There are no search results for either of those that aren't copypastas of the article.
What exactly does "repacked" mean? Did they take the processor, add another chip inside it to act as glue logic, and then encase the whole thing in epoxy? That's what it looks like as far as I can tell. I don't see why this is remarkable, and it definitely doesn't make sense that Intel or AMD should get close to panicking.
Actually, it looks like Intel was in on this.
This article is worthless shit. Fortunately, it links to a much better article: https://www.hotchips.org/hc31/HC31_2.11_Jintide_Server_CPU_final_r6.0.pdf [hotchips.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by brkpt on Wednesday May 27 2020, @10:07AM
I can shed some light on this. The headline is completely wrong and misleading. This is about wanting to use Intel processors even though the Chinese don't trust them (because they are US technology which may include all kinds of backdoors). So they take the processor and add some custom chips around it that periodically check if the untrusted processor is violating its specifications. The pdf details how they tested this approach as well as its downsides (tradeoff between detection rate and performance loss).
(Score: 1) by brkpt on Wednesday May 27 2020, @10:19AM
Well, Intel should not panic since the Chinese are doing this so that they can keep using Intel processors even though they can not trust them. If they get this working with reasonable performance, Intel may be able to compete with Chinese processors in the Chinese market for longer.
This article (and the PDF linked to) is about an approach to make sure a chip that is not trustworthy is still behaving according to its specifications. They are essentially monitoring what data goes in and out of the processor and try to figure out if there is some sort of malicious IC-backdoor active at the moment of inspection. Since this inspection takes time, there is a trade-off between detection rate and performance loss.