China initiatednew guidelinesthatprohibit CPUs made by Intel and AMDfor government PCs and servers. Instead, it has approved 18 processors made byLoongsonandPhytiummake, which the United Statesblacklists.
This is part of China’s nationwide strategy to rely more on its homegrown options as a response to US sanctions, which have blocked many items from China. The Chinese Finance Ministry and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released this guidance late last year, on December 26. State-owned companies were also informed to do the same where the transition towards locally made options should be completed by 2027.
China is an important market for many tech companies, not limited to AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Last year, the country generated 27% of Intel’s sales, earning $54 Billion, while AMD enjoyed $23 Billion in sales, according toreporting from the Financial Times. The government also intends to replaceMicrosoft’s operating system with its domestic alternatives, which provides 1.5% of its revenues.
China may have a rough time delivering competitive chips at the scale necessary, despitebuying many chipmaking toolsin recent months. Intel CEOPat Gelsinger saidthat despite China’s progress in the chipmaking industry, its technology will stay behind by ten years in the foreseeable future. In comparison, chipmaking companies like TSMC, Intel and other companies have new fabrication plants built or being build in the US with a major contribution from theBiden-led US government. Interestingly, Intel has an export license with Huawei, which AMD tried to get it revokedunsuccessfully.
China’s Challenges to Rely on Self-Made CPUs
This would be a challenge as China would have to spend billions in R&D and will need to spend an incalculable amount of time to be self-sustainable. Even with thestolen technologythey can reverse engineer, Fabrication plants rely on other factors. Chinese companies like SMIC and HLMC rely on other companies for raw materials and other technology sources from other companies in respective countries like any other semiconductor makers.China’s Zhaoxin KX-7000 CPUis considered to be six years behind, but it relies on x86 architecture.
It is also unlikely China will be able to make a complete transition to the extent that its citizens will be switching to home-grown CPUs, yet. On the other hand, Russia also has sanctions imposed by the US and the EU, resulting in manyservicesand imports being stopped. While Russia imports computing hardware from China, it is uncertain if the country would import and use Chinese-made CPUs.
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Roshan Ashraf Shaikh has been in the Indian PC hardware community since the early 2000s and has been building PCs, contributing to many Indian tech forums, & blogs. He operated Hardware BBQ for 11 years and wrote news for eTeknix & TweakTown before joining Tom’s Hardware team. Besides tech, he is interested in fighting games, movies, anime, and mechanical watches.
