The other day it became known that the US Department of Commerce added five new Chinese companies and organizations to the list of unreliable from the point of view of national security interests, and all American companies will now have to stop cooperation and interaction with the listed persons on the list. The reason for such actions was the recognition by the Chinese manufacturer of supercomputers and server equipment Sugon in the use of specialized products by the defense structures of the PRC. Recall that it is under the Sugon brand that workstations are produced, which are based on the βChineseβ clones of the first generation AMD Ryzen processors, licensed under the Hygon brand.
Accordingly, now AMD will not be able to cooperate with Chinese partners who participated in the creation of licensed βclonesβ of Ryzen and EPYC processors for sale in the domestic market of China. As we found out recently, Hygon server processors from the first generation American EPYC differed mainly in support of national data encryption standards.
AMD granted the Chinese the right to use the Zen architecture without the possibility of significant modification, and also without the prospect of switching to newer architectures. The company participated in joint ventures with Chinese partners with its intellectual property, and did not provide serious methodological support to Chinese developers. At the first stage, AMD received $ 293 million from Chinese partners, in the future it counted on royalties as it increased production of processors created under the joint venture. In the first quarter of this year, AMD received $60 million in royalties.
In the comments to the resource AMD representatives stressed that the company will follow the requirements of the US authorities, but the final steps to review relations with Chinese partners have not yet been worked out. In the joint venture Haiguang Microelectronics Co, AMD owns 51%, in Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit Design, which specializes in the development of processors, AMD has only 30% ownership. The rest of these enterprises belong to the Chinese company Tianjin Haiguang Holdings, which was included in the new sanctions list.
AMD's Chinese partners are forced to order processor production outside the country. Apparently, the Hygon processors are produced by the American company GlobalFoundries, which will also be forced to stop working with Chinese clients from the sanctions list. For AMD itself, this will be a lesser loss than for its Chinese partners. The company's management was already ready for the fact that cooperation with the Chinese side would be limited to the release of processors with the first generation Zen architecture. Now AMD will have to formally implement the decisions of the American authorities in practice if there are no positive changes in the political plane at the meeting of heads of state.
By the way, NVIDIA and Intel also supplied their server components to Sugon, so they will have to break off relations with this Chinese client. The cessation of production of Hygon processors, architecturally repeating AMD Ryzen and EPYC, will leave the developer of Zhaoxin processors in the domestic market of China, with whom the Taiwanese company VIA is actively cooperating.
Source: 3dnews.ru