Chinese chipmaker insists it has Intel on-side, not inside Chinese vendor Baode Group has denied claims its recently released homegrown CPU is in fact just a rebadged Intel CPU. The chip shop launched its Powerstar P3-01105 CPU in early May, trumpeting it as a local triumph, suitable for all manner of desktop applications. It's not in dispute that the chip uses the x86 architecture. …
There was a case about 25 years ago of an Italian company that utilized a quirk of local law to put out a rebadged Intel processor with their own branding and packaging.
IIRC - and this was a quarter-century ago so details might be fuzzy - the law there at the time said that company A could re-sell company B's products as its own, provided that they were modified in some way (presumably, beyond a certain threshold).
So this Italian company took Intel Celeron 300A processors - the Slot 1 form-factor with 66MHz frontside bus - and masked/cut pin B21, which was a well-known trick to set the FSB to 100MHz and overclock the entire processor to 450MHz (300/66 = 450/100), thereby turning it into a considerably cheaper Pentium II 450 near-equivalent. Despite the smaller L2 cache size the overclocked 300A would perform close enough to the "real" 450 Pentium part, at a sweet $/MHz ratio.
These "factory overclocked" (just, not the Intel factory...) parts were sold under their own brand for a while, with no mention of Intel anywhere on the packaging. I recall that Intel Legal got involved, although I can't remember the outcome. It was skirting pretty close to the edges of the applicable law at the time.
(Side note: I can't remember my nieces' or in-laws' birthdays but I can remember, 25 years later, which edge-connector line needed to be masked off to overclock Slot 1 parts to 100MHz FSB.
FFS!)
This would be a non-news story a few years ago. Just as VIA found it difficult to make a cost effective Intel clone Baode would have similar problems directly competing with Intel and AMD. So the smart thing to do if you were a Chinese manufacturer would be to buy Intel and focus on making profit elsewhere.
Then along comes government with its size 15 boots, tramping over a well oiled international trade machine. Suddenly there's several reasons why it makes sense to build rather than buy, even if the build isn't particularly cost effective (earlier generation / lower performance / not particularly cheap etc.). This doesn't just make an uncompetitive part competitive in a local market -- a huge local market -- but it also provides incentive to continue developing the product. The result is not just a lost market but also the potential for a formidable competitor.
All the posts I've read so far are based on the reasoning that "the Chinese can't do it without stealing our technology". Its the line that's sold to us by our politicians and their paid shills, its the feel good, almost white supremacist line. I'm a bit contrarian, though. I don't see the Chinese as intellectually inferior or less capable -- maybe not as experienced in some areas perhaps but where they're behind they're catching up fast. They will catch and overtake us simply because we're spending a lot of our energy trying to think of ways to stop them rather than spending the effort to out compete them.
All the posts I've read so far are based on the reasoning that "the Chinese can't do it without stealing our technology".
That's not what they say to me. They certainly could do it without our technology, but in this case, they clearly didn't. That this company is using an Intel design isn't in question, and the only remaining question is whether they bought or stole that technology. Neither possibility suggests that Chinese people are incapable of doing it or intellectually inferior. Taking a quick look at the diverse ethnic and national backgrounds of the employees of chip companies who design and build such things would disprove that idea pretty quickly. So would looking at many existing Chinese chip design companies who have succeeded in designing functioning and performant chips, and if manufacturing at high efficiency weren't as monopolized, possibly would have built them.
The reason that China doesn't have an X86 chip as fast as Intel and AMD make is that both those companies have a lot of experience with all the little quirks of the architecture because all the quirks are the fault of one or both of them. They have a lot of internal information about how they designed things before, which they can copy or improve on as desired for each new generation. Other companies don't have that, no matter what country they're in, which is why Zhaoxin processors run X86 code too but not as quickly or efficiently. In other architectures, Chinese companies have had more success creating their own designs, and of course they're successful at designing chips around existing cores, especially for ARM CPUs, and the difference is likely the openness of the design and the availability of a market.
China has the ability to make chips on their own, and if we were in a normal situation, they would do so as they have been for decades. However, it's also clear that, if they decide to, they're also willing to steal technology and copy that instead. There are logical reasons to do so, including sanctions currently placed on them and expected ones should they take a more active role in conquering lands near them. If they were focused on making a profit in a global economy, they wouldn't do it as blatantly, and if they're focused on having technology in a world where they're cut off, they would.
> only remaining question is whether they bought or stole that technology.
According to the article it was bought. Suggest dropping "the Chinese can't do it without stealing our technology" filter when reading.
> The reason that China doesn't have an X86 chip as fast as Intel and AMD
Until the orange gorilla had a strop, they had no compelling reason to establish their own chip industry; a bit like Europe…
Given they are producing (in production quantities and not sample quantities) a mid range 2021 chip (and support chips?), I would suggest the Chinese aren’t far behind Intel and given their access to Huawei HiSilicon I suspect their main limiting factor is going to be getting hold of (or building) the latest generation of fabs, given the sanctions.
Again comparing with Europe, I suspect without US involvement, Europe would struggle to get near a 2021 mid range chip.
I also suspect China’s big problem is software. So currently it would make sense to leverage existing global ecosystems, especially the x86 ecosystem.
Longer-term, would not be surprised if they adopt MIPS RISC-V and build a software industry around that.
"According to the article it was bought. Suggest dropping "the Chinese can't do it without stealing our technology" filter when reading."
According to the company, they bought it. Intel, as the article points out, did not confirm this. I'm inclined to believe them. However, you can't take a company's statement of "Trust us, it's all legal" as unshakeable truth. Companies have been caught before using stuff they didn't have a license for, but when questioned, they all say that there's no problem with their situation. For an example, try asking a lot of companies for GPL source code; you'll get ignored a lot and some companies will actually do it, but you'll also see more than a couple companies who send you a letter explaining why the GPL doesn't apply to them, none of which have any legal legitimacy.
I think you need to remember that what the Americans managed to produce with no prior experience of CPU making was things like the Intel 4004. It took them over 50 years to get from that to where we are today. Chinese designed and manufactured MIPS chips are certainly ahead of that,
Now read GitHub accused of varying Copilot output to avoid copyright allegations. To which I commented on the importance of the global context:
Would we rather allow adversarial countries to accelerate their AI > economy > military, as they do not have to fuss over copyrights? Then wonder why, or why, the western economies are slowing down. Besides every day we hear about whole code bases of large software companies stolen*. Everyone is spying on everyone. Now what?
As a believer in singularity already happening**, and the global context, copyright laws must change***. Knowledge sharing accelerates economic development. Isn't it what everyone wants in the end?
____
* Interestingly hardware tech expertise is really hard to steal (TSMC, ASML). Or Taiwanese educational system.
** Singularity in this context is a rapid acceleration of socioeconomic and scientific processes.
*** Else the West becomes the land of lawyers, not of economical progress.
Reminds me of the mid-90s when Compaq got tired of the Intel hegemony and replaced the Intel CPUs on its PC range with rival AMD's processors. This was a time when Intel's high-decibel "Intel Inside" ad campaign made PC customers question the brand of CPU used in their PCs. Compaq countered this with an ad that went, "When it says Compaq on the outside, nobody cares what's on the inside".
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