Chinese CPUs could soon give Intel a run for its money:
If Intel's venture into the graphics card market has you wishing for more variety for processors too then you might be in luck. According to a report from Taiwan's DigiTimes, an Intel exec claims that Chinese CPU makers will become "strong competitors" to Intel within the next three to five years.
These comments were made by Rui Wang, SVP of Intel Corporation and chair of Intel China at the 2022 National Party Congress on March 11, though no specific maker of Chinese processors was named. Tom's Hardware also notes in its own report that this could simply be Wang trying to be polite given the event was hosted by the Chinese Communist Party given the lack of data provided alongside the predictions.
In fact, the only real support we can see provided for this prediction comes from China's Minister of Information and Technology, Xiao Yaqing, who asserted that the domestic chip industry had grown by a third since this time last year.
[...] Still, China's IT infrastructure is growing at an incredible rate, so while these claims may seem like nothing but appeasement, there is a chance that they could prove true if we see hardware that was previously exclusive to the region released globally. Right now, China provides around a quarter of Intel's annual revenue alone though, so whatever rival processors are hoping to bring the heat, they will need to start on home turf first.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @10:45AM (3 children)
No disrespect to the author but it's a pretty vague fact-free article.
Intel certainly are concerned about mainland Chinese RK3588 and to ward off the RISC-V challenge they are partnering with Si-Five.
But fabs are where it's at and for the time being China has nothing comparable to TSMC & Samsung.
Hence Intel are doubling down on their own fabs and offering to manufacture others' designs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @10:57AM (1 child)
Is there evidence of that? It's a nice looking ARM CPU but years late and not very competitive with Jasper Lake, much less Alder Lake.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @06:50PM
Intel would be more generally concerned by AARCH64 with Apple plus Qualcomm's move into Chromebooks and Windows tablets. That's certainly the thinking behind adopting a hybrid big-little core in Alder Lake over battery life issues.
RK3588 with 16GB signals a shift away from 'embedded' single board computers into a general purpose arm-PC but is anyone going to pay $US300 for such things?
What might ultimately kill Rockchip's competitiveness is geopolitics. The Cortex-A76 in RK3588 is 3 generations old and it is unclear whether Chinese makers will be allowed to access any newer designs. The previous CEO of Arm China was allegedly involved in large scale IP theft.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday March 19 2022, @09:25AM
It's also phrased completely wrong, it should be:
to follow Betteridge's Law.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @12:02PM (5 children)
But nothing that poses much of a threat to x86. The ESP32 is a great embedded processor, but it's Chinese designed, Taiwanese made. It's not really better than what Western companies have but it's much better value. Rockchip and Allwinner are similar, the designs are Chinese (but it's ARM, so only sort-of Chinese designed) and AFAIK they're all actually manufactured in Taiwan.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Friday March 18 2022, @12:40PM (4 children)
The ESP32 "processor" isn't a single processor, nor is it particularly Chinese. It's a family, and the older ones have Tensilicia Xtensa core(s), while the newer ones gradually get switched over to RISC-V. Note that the RISC-V cores they have seem to be incapable of being multi-core, which is an issue, because one core used to run the radio and had real-time constraints because of that, so for proper embedded action, you wanted the dual-core versions.
Espressif are a real oddball for a Chinese company anyway. Originally, they picked the cheapest CPU they could license just to control the radio in a wireless module, likely from a desperate Tensilica at the verge of bankruptcy willing to close any sale. Clever western nerds figured out that the ESP8266 modules could do a lot more, near zero-price. What then happened is untypical for corporations, and even more so for Chinese ones: They figured out they had a winner and latched onto the trend. Not only did they follow up with new hardware that could deal with new use cases, they actually hired good software guys who brought their stack in nice and presentable order.
The latter is where the Rockchip and their ilk will have a hard time: They have not managed to build a decent ecosystem so far, which, more than the price, is the selling point of the Raspi. The RK3588 is a great chip, which I've been eagerly looking forward to, but it isn't a great deal if boards are offered for twice what a Raspi 4 costs - it may have roughly twice the performance, but the missing ecosystem is the deal breaker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @12:49PM (3 children)
Huh? Rockchip boards pretty much all run mainline Linux. What kind of ecosystem do you need that is bigger than all of ARM64 Linux?
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday March 18 2022, @03:19PM (1 child)
One that has ISO downloads for a Debian-based distro for the most popular boards, with preconfigured device trees for the hardware wiring, working graphics acceleration, and the confidence that thousands of people have used that before without despairing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @07:01PM
Out of the box? No.
But the previous generation RockPro64 did achieve SystemReady certification.
Pine64 seem to have a cult following of supplying cheap hardware to an unpaid hacker community willing to reverse engineer all those perils you mention.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday March 19 2022, @09:37AM
They can run mainline Linux as generic Arm CPUs, but not in a way that takes advantage of any of the advanced capabilities of the hardware. Admittedly Rockchip are better than Allwinner in terms of supporting OSS, but it's still a real struggle to get support for anything other than pretty generic capabilities dating from three-generations-ago hardware. Having to hand-patch your kernel with a binary blob you found on a dodgy web site in China every time you want to use some slightly non-generic hardware capability gets old real fast.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Friday March 18 2022, @12:57PM (4 children)
Nobody, absolutely no one, is going to trust a chip with a “Trusted” Platform Module built in China.
Heck, I don’t trust the ones built by Intel. But effectively giving invisible root access to uninspectable code written by a company this inevitable have ties to the Chinese government is silly in its face.
The Huatai ban has nothing on what would happen to these chips.
Now, if they ship chips which provable contain no TPM-like module, and this might someone lead the industry away from TPM as a terrible idea, then I’m all for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @01:57PM (1 child)
As late capitalism squeezes more people they will have no choice but to go with the cheapest product
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @08:56PM
Still better than the national socialism of Germany or soviet socialism of Russia.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @03:38PM
I don't live in China. I'd rather the CCP spy on me than my own government.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday March 18 2022, @04:33PM
Don't confuse TPM, locked bootloaders, secure enclaves, and ME. The TPM('s remote attestation feature) is "merely" there to audit the software running and report that to your masters. (In practice they will try to leverage that feature to cut you off software, media, and business if you're not a good little pawn and run what you're told).
The ME is what you describe, a separate processor with invisible root in the background. The combination of locked boot and secure enclave is a cheapskate attempt at something like a ME. But as long as you control the "trust root" here (and have a Debian-like repo upstream for your software supply), you're good. I think such a configuration is the case for RK3588 SBC systems.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18 2022, @06:48PM
After reading the same old, same old every year for 20 years straight, this kind of thing has gotten really boring.
http://www.china.org.cn/english/scitech/44468.htm [china.org.cn]