The AMD–Chinese joint venture is the

agreement Agreement may refer to: Agreements between people and organizations * Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law * Trade agreement, between countries * Consensus, a decision-making process * Contract, enforceable in a court of law ** Meeting o ...

between the American semiconductor company

Advanced Micro Devices Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufact ...

(AMD) and China-based partners to license and build

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

-compatible CPUs for the Chinese-based market. It is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology, but was negotiated and agreed to well before the 2018 trade war between the US and China. It is similar to the

Zhaoxin Zhaoxin (Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Co., Ltd.; , ) is a Fabless manufacturing, fabless semiconductor company, created in 2013 as a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. The company manufactures x86-com ...

joint venture supported by

VIA Technologies VIA Technologies Inc. (), is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory. It was the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, VIA ...

Structure

AMD has received permission from the US Department of Defence and Department of Commerce to export the Zen 1 core design to China. Due to legal restrictions AMD has set up multiple companies to allow licensing of

technology to China. The overarching joint venture is the Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co. Ltd. (THATIC). THATIC is owned by "AMD and both public and private Chinese companies, including the

Chinese Academy of Sciences The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS); ), known by Academia Sinica in English until the 1980s, is the national academy of the People's Republic of China for natural sciences. It has historical origins in the Academia Sinica during the Republi ...

": however its major share is reportedly owned by AMD itself. The joint-venture set up Haiguang Microelectronics Co. Ltd. (HMC) and Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit Design Co. Ltd. (Hygon), with controlling stakes being held by AMD and THATIC respectively. HMC owns the local intellectual property and subcontracts manufacturing for the chip, while Hygon designs the chip and markets and sells the processors.

History

The joint venture was announced by AMD in 2016. The first processor was released in 2018. At the

Computex COMPUTEX Taipei, or Taipei International Information Technology Show (), is a computer expo held annually in Taipei, Taiwan. Since the early 2000s, it is one of the largest computer and technology trade shows in the world. The last COMPUTEX wa ...

2019 trade show, AMD CEO

Lisa Su Lisa Su (; born 7 November 1969) is a Taiwanese-American business executive and electrical engineer, who is the president, chief executive officer and chair of AMD. Early in her career, Su worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semi ...

confirmed that the licence will be limited to the original Zen architecture, and would not be extended to Zen 2. On June 24, 2019, the U.S. government placed one of the parent companies, and thus the joint venture, on its export control

Entity List The Entity List is a trade restriction list published by the United States Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), consisting of certain foreign persons, entities, or governments. Entities on the Entity List are subject to U ...

, which bans further technology transfers from AMD and possibly hampers its existing operations. The opinion of Anandtech is that further AMD involvement in the joint venture will be minimal due to the ban.

Microprocessors

Hygon SOC

The initial microprocessor created in 2018 is the

Hygon Dhyana Epyc is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and sold by AMD, based on the company's Zen microarchitecture. Introduced in June 2017, they are specifically targeted for the server and embedded system markets. Epyc processors share ...

system on a chip. It is noted to be a variant of the AMD

Epyc Epyc is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and sold by AMD, based on the company's Zen microarchitecture. Introduced in June 2017, they are specifically targeted for the server and embedded system markets. Epyc processors share ...

and is so similar that "there is little to no differentiation between the chips." It has been noted that there is "less than 200 lines of new kernel code" for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

kernel support, and that the Dhyana is "mostly a re-branded Zen CPU for the Chinese server market." Testing in 2020 suggested that "integer performance is essentially identical, however the floating point and

RDRAND RDRAND (for "read random"; known as Intel Secure Key Technology, previously known as Bull Mountain) is an instruction for returning random numbers from an Intel on-chip hardware random number generator which has been seeded by an on-chip entropy s ...

and RDSEED instructions' performance has been reduced" from the equivalent Zen 1 processor. The cryptography extensions like AES have been replaced by Chinese versions called SM2, SM3 and SM4 which are according to Anandtech are very similar to ECC(-based),

SHA-256 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compressi ...

and

AES-128 The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant ...

algorithms respectively. AVX/AVX2 was also disabled, but the research has suspected that it happened due to a bug rather than was done intentionally.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:AMD-Chinese joint venture AMD AMD x86 microprocessors Microprocessors made in China Technology companies established in 2016 Technology companies of China Chinese-foreign joint-venture companies

Structure

History

Microprocessors

Hygon SOC

See also

References