Twist my Arm why don't you: Brit CPU behemoth latest biz to cease work with Huawei – report Brit chip designer Arm has now severed its links with Huawei in accordance with US sanctions, depriving the Chinese smartphone maker of a crucial supplier. Arm employees were ordered to stop work on "all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements" on 16 May, according to the BBC. A British behemoth in …
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I understand all of that. I actually had an Archimedes on my office desk for a while in the Nineties. The BBC said some components or elements of the design were from US or used US technology. They didn't say what those components were, I assume it is not the core processor but some ancillary tech. Or the BBC got it wrong.
Not sure about the downvotes. I don't like this state of affairs either, but if the US won't let you use or licence some tech, you don't have any option, surely?
Debatable. George Boole first introduced his algebra in "The Mathematical Analysis of Logic" which was published in 1847, when he was still living and working in Lincoln. He didn't got to Ireland until 2 years later, and whilst there did more work and published "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" in 1854 where he discusses it more thoroughly.
The apology was not meant for the orange arse ( he can fuck off ) but the worlds population that are being affected by his status as head arse in the US. I feel the same way about the head Chines ( calling him Pooh is an insult to teddys everywhere) arse, but this is not the way to sort it. The world we all have to live in is not bullshit reality TV..
So 5 years hence, when Chinese companies have their own chipsets running their own OS, how will this benefit Google, ARM, the US?
Will ten-year-olds in the US be working in sweatshops producing cheap tee-shirts for the Chinese market, while Chinese tech companies move up the value chain?
"Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday vowed there would be no mandatory technology transfers in China’s manufacturing sector, in the latest bid to reassure the country’s frustrated trading partners.
Foreign companies have complained for years about forced technology transfers in exchange for market access in China, including having to reveal their most sophisticated or key technology to Chinese partners in joint ventures.
They say forced technology transfers are rife in the car, semiconductor and new energy battery industries, but Beijing has not officially acknowledged that such practices exist."
I'll leave it to you to google rest, unless you have Huawei phone of course.
"I'll leave it to you to google rest"
Unfortunately, these idiots don't bother researching for themselves, they just accept whatever the media tells them is fact and don't bother looking for themselves. You don't need to look any further than Obama lovers and Trump haters to see who researches and who accepts the media at their word.
I'd call you out for septics, but it works well either way :)
Google - the engine - is a tool. Put a request on the line and it returns what it can find. Now sure, some of those results are going to be gamified, but if you lack the basic intelligence to weigh metrics based on it's internal logic and center of basis, then you're never going to know the truth because you don't know how to recognize it when you see it.
That's ok. I'm sure the media can feed you their version of the truth, which often happens to be skewed to their own political agenda and rarely bare factual basis. If that's your decision, go ahead. Just don't expect to find many intelligent people that agree with you.
The US became a dominant economy largely because of its refusal to acknowledge what we would now consider intellectual property rights of the incumbent industrial powers. It's rather difficult to bootstrap an industrial sector if you can only import industrial goods or pay a high premium in an undeveloped market for the privilege of making things. Hardly surprising if China were to follow America's path.
The same did not apply within the US, of course. Ironically, the reason that the prime beneficiary of copyright - the movie industry - is based in Hollywood is that early cinematographers had fled from New York where Edison had hired gangs of thugs to smash their cameras in a patent dispute.
It's probably more of a problem that so much low-end technology is now made in China than high-end stuff. It's arguably more difficult to sustain an exclusively high-tech economy because you don't have the critical mass of talent and investors who are prepared to invest in making things.
I think the answer is the same as always. The current politicians don't care.
They will have their pensions, jobs from their mates, and a massive fortune that will isolate them from any real consequences.
To sum up, it will be someone else's problem to deal with the fallout.
Kick in the balls is right! Well that's going to accelerate CPU development in China, the Chinese government isn't going to take this lying down!
I suspect this is a watershed moment, where the whole Chinese population will decide that the Americans are ruthless and untrustworthy.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour because the US was denying it access to oil (as one theory goes). This decision really feels similar. Eventually the US will find itself isolated, they're pissing off so many countries. But before that many dangerous things can happen....
No, the Pearl Harbor attack started way back in the 1850s when Peary forced a landing in Japan and demanded American access. (Familiar pattern?). But when the Japanese started emigrating to California and turning out to be excellent farmers, the US kicked them out. (Familiar pattern again?)
Then after WW1 the US refused to join the League of Nations because it wanted non-white and white people to have equality, and good ole racist USA wasn't having that.
The result was that Japan decided to build an empire in northern China - which was pretty terrible. They thought that they would need to fight a war in Russia to keep their Chinese territory.
The US meanwhile embargoed everything they could think of, including oil (seems suddenly very relevant.)
The Japanese military thought that a successful attack on Pearl Harbor might persuade the US to stay out of Asia, allowing them to concentrate on defeating Russia. It was because the few Japanese who had been to America and realised how big and how productive it was, were ignored by the military who thought the US was smaller and less powerful than Japan.
It isn't an exact analogy because this time the forces on either side are more equal. But given the results of American racism and aggression over nearly a century, the prospects are not good.
(George Feifer is a good initial go-to for the background.)
The basic facts are correct, but not all the connections. Japan decided it needed to build an empire very early in the 19th century when it was afraid of being overrun by the Dutch, the Portuguese and others, but it lacked the means to do so until over 100 year later when British had shown them how to build a decent navy, the Prussians had reformed the Japanese army and the French had helped them set up an air force.
Nice article, however I'm not sure I agree with:
...realised how big and how productive it was, were ignored by the military who thought the US was smaller and less powerful than Japan.
My understanding is a little different, but to be honest it's not like I've done research into this recently from what I'd learned 20 years ago, and the historical position may have changed in the meantime (history is, after all, written by the winners).
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a failure in that the aircraft carriers that were the primary purpose of the attack were out on an exercise, and not in port, thus were not destroyed in the raid.
If the carriers had been destroyed, then while I have little doubt the allies would have still won WWII, it probably would have lasted longer though.
Without the carriers, the Japanese would have had a much freer hand in the Pacific for much longer until the US could replace them. This would undoubtedly have led to losing Oceania to the Japanese as well. With an extra year, the Japanese positions would have been better consolidated, they'd have more resources, a bigger stockpile of arms and materials, more of everything basically. Or, the US could have diverted more Atlantic units to the Pacific, thus impacting the fight in Europe, thus giving the European Axis powers a chance to consolidate their positions.
As I said, I still think the Allies would have won, but many things would have turned out differently, more dead, more destruction, different political positions after the war, e.g. USSR may have taken a bigger slice of Europe if the Americans had to divert more from Europe to the Pacific, and so on.
Of course, this could be said of many other events, "if this was more successful", or "if that went worse than it did".
However, the raid on Pearl Harbor was a known gamble by the Japanese, their entire strategy relied on a successful Pearl Harbor attack - where successful means having destroyed or crippled the US Pacific Fleet's carriers - to buy them enough time to better consolidate their positions in the Pacific, perhaps resulting in a negotiated peace. But they failed.
"where the whole Chinese population will decide that the Americans are ruthless and untrustworthy."
If they're only deciding that now they've been slow off the mark.
I wonder what the legality of all this is in terms if international law. The repercussions of this could be enriching lawyers for years.
At least to Trump that's how it is, America is immune to International law. As a matter of fact the tiny fingered loofa-faced shitgibbon emperor of america goes even further, trump consider's itself personally immune to all laws, be them International law, American Imperial law, Congress law or any other law.
Give trump a law and the loofa-faced emperor wipes its ass with it, trumps does not care for the law, even the laws that trump made get the wipe ass treatment .
If a Japanese-owned design house in the UK are licensing stuff to be made in the far East, then even if it does contain licensed US technology you cannot simply revoke a license once purchased. That is illegal under international trade law. A legal challenge would comfortably outlast Trump.
The real question is, why does a Japanese-owned company in the UK see its future more closely allied to Trump's last days than to China? I smell a rat here. A critical moment in Intel's life-support plan perhaps?
Most likely because the US judicial system has been supporting US companies at the expense of foreign ones for decades, no matter the party in power. When Trump is gone, the next president from whatever party is unlikely to cancel everything he did, if only because a US president has to act macho all the time.
"I smell a rat here"
Couldn't agree more. Someone political has threatened had a word with ARM over what might happen to anything using their designs if they continue to supply China companies with licenses.
I see no reason the Board of Directors would reach the conclusion they need to comply with the US regulations on their own, somebody must have influenced them.
There's a reason for that. Look no further than the pure idiocy perpetuated by Obama to understand why Trump not only got elected, but thanks to the ever-increasing batshit insanity that is the democrat party, is likely to win again.
Couldn't agree more. Someone political has threatened had a word with ARM over what might happen to anything using their designs if they continue to supply China companies with licenses.
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The word was had with Softbank, rather? Regardless how you look at it, ARM is worse off than before, I can't imagine them being so eager on their own, it probably was forced on them...
(this is pure speculation, no insight whatsoever, personal opinion)
If Huawei was smart, they'd now sponsor alternative firmwares for their devices and unlock their bootloaders so people can run actually free firmware on those, then they'd also move from ARM to RISC-V.
In the long term this could be good for all of us... probably bad for the US, but few of us live there.
>so people can run actually free firmware...
Just need to ensure that the free firmware and its development repository isn't hosted on US systems and that contributions from US sources are handled very carefully...
Some parts of the open source movement can say they saw this coming, hence why great efforts went into ensuring key software developments eg. encryption and OS, were hosted on servers outside of the US.
If you are involved in open source, warning bells should now be sounding: if your project is hosted on a US owned or located repository, and/or it accepts contributions from US companies (and nationals?), it can be claimed to contain “US origin technology”...
"There are a LOT of things sold in the US that have ARM licensed chips irrespective of where they are made.
Like a Mafioso protection racket: "Would be a shame if all those things couldn't be sold any more"
Do you really not see the problem those two statements describe - and I don't mean a problem for ARM.
> US laws being applicable to UK or Japanese companies?
Arm Holdings, Inc. is a US corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. As such, it has to obey US laws.
ARM's designs are not created exclusively outside of US. ARM has a significant R&D presence in Austin, TX and in California. If ARM Holdings, Inc. decided to ignore the US, ARM's US export license could be revoked.
Also, Global Foundries is one of ARM's chip manufacturers. GlobalFoundries is a US corporation as well, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA.
So yes, there are a lot of applicable US laws here.
>Arm Holdings, Inc. is a US corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. As such, it has to obey US laws.
>So yes, there are a lot of applicable US laws here.
I would hope Linus and friends are now looking very closely at what contains “US origin technology” may mean for Linux and associated open source projects sponsored by organisations such as the LinuxFoundation - HQ San Francisco...
There are a series of regulations like ITAR which can allow the US to prevent a company from doing business with US companies should they break the regulations.
The US companies that most others rely on include the banking and finance sectors (how do you accept retail payments if VISA, Mastercard etc) wont handle your payments (not that ARM make retail sales, but that was just an example).
This was apparent when Wikileaks had pretty much all of the means of accepting money turned off at the height of the Bradley Manning/Edward Snowdon controversy.
Until there are non-US payment processors and other financial systems, the US will have a means of affecting companies that do not comply with their edicts.
I guess you're unfamiliar with the concept of "extraterritoriality", which is a shame as e.g. the story of UK IT business Systime (starting in the 1970s?) hinges around whether US extraterritoriality is legit or not.
"Systime plc was an entrepreneurial company founded in Leeds by Mr. John Gow and others in the mid-seventies. Its major business developed around retailing of equipment purchased mainly from Digital Equipment Corporation, with additional parts and software. DEC, as Digital is known, is the second largest computer company in the world, based near Boston, Massachusetts. It built up its huge sales mainly by wholesaling equipment to companies, such as Systime, which then sold the equipment to end users.
In 1979, Systime's management discovered that it was about 25 per cent. cheaper to buy equipment direct from DEC in the United States than from DEC's subsidiary in the United Kingdom. DEC UK objected to the loss of profit that that implied, and persuaded DEC US to insist that equipment could be bought only from the subsidiary. Subsequently, when DEC US tried to break its contract with the Systime subsidiary in the United States, Systime's management commenced an anti-trust action in which the British Government took an amicus curiae position. DEC drew back and agreed to a partial continuation of supply. Systime appeared to have won a breathing space, but it was only temporary. That is apparently the only time that the British Government have openly defended Systime, and, significantly, the only time that DEC has drawn back.
In 1979, DEC UK, under its American manager, Mr. Darryl Barbé launched a formal campaign known as the "Kill Systime" campaign. He had the full support of the American management. The DEC president, Mr. Ken Olsen, was subsequently overheard leaving a board-level meeting with another company, declaring that he wished to see Systime out of business. Mr. Pier-Carlo Falotti, European vice-president of DEC, said to DEC staff: "I want you guys to go out and kill Systime."
918
DEC's most senior vice-president, Mr. Jack Shields, was regularly in the United Kingdom, supervising the events that I shall set out. Between 1980 and 1983, Systime grew rapidly, making sales to the British and United States Governments, and commencing the manufacture of ruggadised computers for the Ministry of Defence. Exports also grew to the benefit of the United Kingdom.
The British Technology Group, the Government's investment arm, and others invested heavily in Systime. By the end of 1982 the need for new cash to support the now rapid growth of the company became urgent. That was well known to DEC, which took unique and wholly improper advantage to destroy Systime.
Besides the openly declared "Kill Systime" campaign, there was a secret investigation conducted on DEC's behalf by a private detective agency, Network Security Services. I was told by one ex-DEC employee that Network Security Services "have contacts everywhere."
(continues - extracted from
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1986/feb/25/systime-plc)
(Original AC here)
There were ongoing reports of corporate DEC not wanting a "grey market" in their kit. There are modern equivalents (not with DEC) but with various branded items, not necessarily even in the computer industry e.g. in clothing and perfume and phones and beyond.
Back then, Systime took essential bits of genuine DEC hardware and added stuff such as power supplies and storage and cables that came straight off the shelf from industry vendors, and sold them on at rather lower prices than the DEC UK management were accustomed to charging.
Another aspect was that if DEC kit sold by a UK company was found to end up in places where the US government didn't want it to be, DEC UK was at risk of losing its licence to readily import DEC kit from the USA.
Systime employees at various levels have said that some DEC systems they sold ended up in places the US government didn't want such systems to be in. Without the generic US export licence, every computer order taken by DEC UK back then would have needed individual clearance with the US export control regime. Ooops.
And that takes us straight back to extraterritoriality forty years ago, vs extraterritoriality today.
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That's what you get when you don't pay attention to it.
The reason the Russians are so damn good in coding is because the US stopped them from having the latest, most powerful systems so they were forced to be intelligent and efficient with what they had, while the US .. well, look at how bloated Microsoft code is to demonstrate how too much power encourages wasteful programming - why on earth does one have to wait for a word processor?!?
The Japanese were not given many IPv4 addresses, so they had to go down the IPv6 route much earlier than any of us. While we are still coming to grips with it now IPv4 is "finished" (allegedly there's still trade), they already have years and years of expertise - waaay ahead of the Americans (and us).
So, sure, let's cut the Chinese off from the slowdown that Western tech brings and let them invent their own things. The result will be predictable. Of course, by that time, Trump will orange from head to toe on account of being in jail, but this is where it starts. They could not have done them a bigger favour. Short term it sucks, long term they've just hot themselves in the foot. Again. Maybe another reason why gun control would be a good idea?
Well, "brand name Russian-owned" does not seem to be synonymous with "developed by Russian programmers": Russian oligarchs invested heavily into Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Zynga, Checkout, Alibaba, Xiaomi, ICQ, Groupon, Airbnb, Spotify etc, not sure if this is what you meant. Mentioning some Russian-born Sergey billionaires might not be quite fair either.
Imho listing large software companies founded by Russian tech entrepreneurs educated in Russia would do the trick, here you go, you might recognize some:
ABBYY
Acronis
Acumatica
IPG Photonics (not software but hey, cool lasers)
Jetbrains (IntelliJ/Kotlin/Teamcity)
Luxsoft
Nginx
Ntechlab (Findface)
Paragon
Parallels
Playrix (Township/Homescapes)
Plesk
Revolut (yup)
Tamosoft (Tamograph)
Telegram
Veeam
Virtuozzo
Yandex
Sorry Whatsapp (part Ukrainian), EPAM, Wargaming/World of Tanks (both Belarus) probably do not qualify.
Russia has been dealt a tough hand, a legacy of problems contribute to Russia's economic situation, a situation that would be much worse had the Russians been fool enough to get swindled by the great amercan con.
Glasnost exposed what was really going on: pretend to the workers that they own everything while actually robbing them blind. No one country or system is perfect but in various forms over the years Russia has been nothing but kleptocracy.
"in various forms over the years Russia has been nothing but kleptocracy."
And they've been exporting it lately too.
There's a shipload of hot Russian money in London in the last few years, and a shipload of Westminster establishment politicians of various parties sharing the yachts of Russian oligarchs.
Good job I can't remember any names... oh wait, try starting with Deripaska and see where it leads. E.g.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-corfu-controversy-how-the-world-really-works-973817.html
> The reason the Russians are so damn good in coding is because the US stopped them from having the latest, most powerful systems so they were forced to be intelligent and efficient with what they had [ ... ]
Not really.
The Soviets got their hands on western computer systems designs. At first, early '70's, it was mainframes. Then came the DEC VAX designs and VMS code and AT&T's source code to UNIX Version 6, then Version 7, then SVR3. All of this courtesy of the USSR KGB and GRU and their Six Little Sisters - espionage for VAX and VMS, and stolen from US universities by the same, where AT&T's source code was available.
Warsaw Treaty espionage targeting Western computer systems design was big business in the '70's and '80's. It was an integral and important part of the Eastern Bloc's defense posture and strategy.
DEC VAX clones running VMS derivatives or various versions of AT&T UNIX were being manufactured in several countries from the Eastern Bloc in the late '70's throughout the '80's, up until its collapse in 1989. The hardware designs and the source code originally came from the USSR. All the Warsaw Treaty countries were involved, plus Cuba. China was a big importer of these machines.
Wikipedia - History of Computer Hardware in Soviet Bloc Countries, but unfortunately it's far from complete, and not very detailed.
Exactly.
And it’s worth noting that ARM and ARM China are separated, so they can play on both sides of a trade war.
The most bizarre thing is that Huawei’s biggest American “supplier” is the patent licensing they have to pay Qualcomm. So The Orange One just made it illegal for the second largest phone manufacturer in the world to pay Qualcomm tens of billions, without actually stopping Huawei making phones, or hurting their sales in their main market. They don’t call him The Bigliest Genius President Ever for nothing!
Is anybody taking bets on what the Chinese government's response is going to be?
My money is on China suspending copyrights and patents of the Western companies in the technology sector until the Huawei sanctions are lifted. This looks like something they could plausibly argue is a proportionate response to an unlawful trade restraint under the WTO rules - see the Antigua vs. the USA gambling dispute (https://antiguawto.com/).
Is anybody taking bets on what the Chinese government's response is going to be?
I have bet my family's savings and home on China caving, offering a grovelling apology to Trump and the American people, promising never to do it again, and writing-off America's trillion dollar debt to China as a show of goodwill.
I can't wait for my loved ones to get home so I can tell them I have assured their future.
Huawei holds various ARM licences. I expect the contract says they have rights that can't be unilaterally withdrawn, and that they pay ongoing royalties for those.
Arm harm could go a lot further than Huawei. Today's news is the first to make me really glad I no longer hold ARM shares (which I was sorry to part with despite the profit I made when Softbank bought them).
ARM's whole ecosystem (like Android's) only works if participants are treated fairly. This could provide an impetus for an industry-wide effort to develop a real alternative to ARM (perhaps even more so when you add Qualcomm's aggressive behaviour within the ecosystem). By analogy, imagine the impetus Linux might've got if, twenty years ago, Microsoft had suddenly withheld cooperation from Dell or Compaq shipping Windows.
Whose law?
Trump's law (using "national emergency" to override his own country's rule of law) governs a contract between on the one hand a Japanese-owned British company, and on the other hand a Chinese company.
No wonder Trump vetoed WTO continuation!
... and if BSD hadn't been caught up in legal hassle, linux probably wouldn't be a thing, and microsoft would have arguably been less succdssful.
http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/att_lawsuit_as_a_launcher_for_linux.shtml
Well iphones will be the first to go. If the Chinese block those that would hurt Apple (and the US stock market) big time. And there are reports of Chinese people already dumping iphones for Huawei because of this.
The list of US companies needing access to China's massive market to continue sales growth is pretty long.
Does it? Really? Is where it sits more important, or less important, than where the control is? (Or where the jobs adverts say the work is :) )
Imagination Technologies were a long time major supplier to Apple. Then there was a conscious uncoupling or whatever they call these things:
"Imagination Technologies not only lost key engineers to Apple who set up a 22,500-square-foot design center in St. Albans, only a few miles from Imagination Technologies, but also ended up being bought out for £550M (around $700M) by Chinese-backed Canyon Bridge in November 2017."
from https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333614#
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-imagination-technologies-deal/canyon-bridge-bid-for-imagination-technologies-approved-by-uk-court-idUKKBN1D22FQ (March 2018)
https://www.imgtec.com/news/press-release/imagination-technologies-group-ltd-announces-ceo-succession-13-12-18/ (December 2018)
Anyway, thanks for joining TheRegister today, tulpe.
Softbank owns 80% of Sprint, a US mobile carrier. Sprint is now the smallest, weakest and least profitable of the 4 major carriers, and is thought to be circling the drain. Softbank is attempting to get a merger with T-Mobile approved by the US Department of Justice in order to salvage its investment.
Softbank also owns ARM.
Fuck their militarism, fuck their strong-arming, fuck their sanctions, fuck their embargoes, fuck their extraterritorial drone strikes, fuck their torturing, fuck their regime change wars, fuck their endless wars, fuck their interventions, fuck their trouble-making, fuck their support of dictatorships, fuck their blockades, fuck their arrogance, fuck them not for not following international norms, fuck them for all the treaties they haven't signed up to, fuck them for all the treaties they've pulled out of, fuck their double-standards, fuck their imperialism, fuck their support of Israel, fuck the lot of them.
I hope and pray that China is the rock upon which the USS Hegemon is shipwrecked.
Anything even slightly touched by US engineers is considered US tech.
Breaking trade compliance and White House diktats opens your execs and employees up to federal detention.
Given the supine way the UK, Canada etc rolls over and hands over their own and other's citizens to the US it's not surprising corps apply the most stringent interpretations of the rules.
Easy for armchair commentards to rail against such things when it's not their asses on the line during business trips.
Actually the "US-origin content" needs to be 25% or more by value to fall under these laws. But obviously that's hard to quantify with IP. You can understand them playing on the safe side. You don't want to be in a US jail while the lawyers debate the issue, possibly for years.
Interdigital plan to carry on licensing as their agreements only cover patents. Those are matters of public record, so the agreement is "we won't sue you" rather than actually sharing any technology - the sharing already happened when the patent was published. I wonder if this route might allow use of ARM's US originated IPR?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-usa-interdigital-us-idUSKCN1SR06C
Both RISC-V and MIPS are subject to US embargo.
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That does not have quite the same impact.
ARM fences improvements to the architecture and instruction set behind a business contract, thus making it unfeasible.
For RISCV/MIPS you can download them freely, or you can license already existing IP from a non-encumbered vendor as a start off point for your thing.
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