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from the you-can-go-your-own-way-and-call-it-another-lonely-day dept.
China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in government computers, FT reports By Reuters:
(Reuters) -China has introduced guidelines to phase out U.S. microprocessors from Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) and AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) from government personal computers and servers, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)'s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options, the report said.
Government agencies above the township level have been told to include criteria requiring "safe and reliable" processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said.
China's industry ministry in late December issued a statement with three separate lists of CPUs, operating systems and centralised database deemed "safe and reliable" for three years after the publication date, all from Chinese companies, Reuters checks showed.
[...] The U.S. has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor output and reduce reliance on China and Taiwan with the Biden administration's 2022 CHIPS and Science Act.
It is designed to bolster U.S. semiconductors and contains financial aid for domestic production with subsidies for production of advanced chips.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Tuesday April 02 2024, @09:30AM (5 children)
SPARC64 and MIPS64 are effectively dead except in tiny niches. SPARC was hamstrung by its fixed sized register windows. It was fine I the 32-bit 50MHz days. MIPS was better but investment stopped over 20 years ago. Fujitsu made 64-bit SPARC fast, but in incredibly expensive niches. Internally AMD64 (and intel) is super efficient these days. The CPU wars are over.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 02 2024, @10:13AM
LoongArch is a modern MIPS-ish ISA with pretty high performance, but good luck getting your hands on a board outside China.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday April 02 2024, @10:20AM (3 children)
MIPS investment only stopped in the west, China kept going with Loongson. It now his its own claimed ISA, but it's really just a fork of MIPS64.
And for the inevitable "but they're nowhere near as fast as AMD and Intel chips", for most government use they don't need to be, a 20-year-old CPU is just fine for email, a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a web browser to receive what Xinhua wants to tell you. WPS Office for example doesn't give any real CPU requirements but you do need a massive 2GB RAM like a computer from the early 2000s, which Windows 10 won't even load into despite Microsoft's claims (you need at least 4GB just to have enough room for the OS to sit there doing nothing).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Tuesday April 02 2024, @05:06PM (2 children)
RISC V will dominate eventually, in the same way that Linux eventually dominated the unix market.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday April 02 2024, @06:44PM (1 child)
RISC-V/64 trembles under load. I am not happy about that.
One dubious factor is under-engineered coherency and either insufficiency or total lack of atomic primitives, depending on realized core.
That affects existing ported code badly, things which work perfectly under RV64 software emulator hosted on amd64 crash badly on real RV64 hardware.
So, it is somewhere where Athlon64 has been in early 2000's. RISC-V need 20 years more to mature, I am afraid.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Tuesday April 02 2024, @08:32PM
It will mature. "Linux is a bathtub of code."
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].