If you look at the really cheap multimeters based on the DT830 design root they were originally derived from early Fluke DMMs circa 1985. Fluke hired Intersil to make the ASIC, Intersil second sourced it, the Chinese cloned it and cost optimised it, and then more Chinese guys cloned the target devices (panel meters and DMMs) and built mass production lines. Optimally they even optimised out the DIP packages as they were expensive and bonded the die straight to the PCB.

Down from $500 a pop to $2.

Samsung announced today that the Chinese stole their new bendable screen technology.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft...

For instance, you can only manufacture CPUs in certain countries if the process is a couple of generations old. As Moore's law slow down the improvement from generation to generation will become less, are our current regulations sufficient enough to address this coming future? That's my concern.

Happens all the time.

There are things that one should not do no matter how tempting it looks. Rusdian roulette can be very attractive as 5 out 6 persons who tried claimed that it was a harmless.

> Your leaders at Intel appear to know more about business than you do: that it is higher risk over the long term to lose market share, because that gives your competitors revenue to support R&D and opportunities to work with and leverage a customer base to develop a better product.

Why would Intel be losing market share by not manufacturing chips in China? They may still manufacture the same number of chips but with less profit.

> China has no problem making a CPU on their own. They just can't make a commercially competitive CPU, yet.

Pretty sure parent comments meant processor fab tech in addition to processor tech. That is, tech that makes it possible to manufacture a competitive CPU at competitive costs.

That's why TSMC and Samsung are spanking Intel in fab technology, which was originally Intel's competitive advantage, because Intel dropped the ball on ARM architecture chips due to its inwards-looking obsession with profitable x86. Intel is now boxed into the same low-volume corner as, say IBM PowerPC and ultimately condemned to irrelevance.

The last thing you want is for the Chinese to start investing in their own fabs and have a captive source of demand for those fabs' output, e.g. x86/x64 chips licensed from AMD. Quite frankly, they're going to steal the technology from TSMC and Samsung, not a has-been like Intel that's been incapable of moving to 10nm.

I'd argue a company like Huawei is probably able to make that kind of fab investment (they also design their own ARM chips), and they've shown in the past they are willing to take the long view by out-investing in R&D their Western competitors managed by the typical short-termist bean counter MBAs. That's why Huawei's CFO (and daughter of the founder) was arrested in Canada, to pressure them not to cooperate with the Chinese government's "Made in China 2025" plan to wean itself off dependence on US-controlled microelectronics. The fact John Bolton admitted he was aware of the move shows it was made on geopolitical grounds.

Governments can intervene to keep the playing field level, while protecting the national interests.

If it's true that the US has a dominant position in this space, then it's true that the US government has an opportunity to prevent the US companies from shifting manufacturing to where it's likely to result in IP theft in the process of competing with eachother in the manufacturing costs deparment.

If all the companies in the space are forced to ignore the cheaper manufacturing option, that self-destructive avenue of competition is off the table on equal terms. However there's still the threat of foreign competition undercutting on manufacturing, if they catch up in the IP department (which IP theft certainly accelerates).

A very difficult trade-off I guess.

And the best part is, if you force all the companies to act this way, and get some odd government protection for the large ones, the companies won't even go out of business. It's just society that gets poorer.

Yes, I agree it would be nice for the United States if Intel's discount rate was lower, but where's the evidence? Does opening a chip packaging plant in China show "legacy, loyalty to family, country, environmentalism, pride, general ethics, etc"?

>To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose [i.e., seen through rose-tinted glasses]. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.

The preface ends on a wonderful little note that hopefully everyone can agree on:

>Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine: “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.” [Follow your own course, and let people talk – paraphrased from Dante] Karl Marx, London. July 25, 1867.

One could spend their whole life studying Marx and not get through half of the work in Marxology (and two lifetimes if we include mathematical Marxism), value theory and classical economics - but to me that makes it all the better.

Were you asking about philosophy in general? In that case, I admit I'm not very well read at all, even on Marx's Hegelian background - but there is a rather famous 4chan /lit/ board guide to philosophy from the start, though in my experience, it need not be read sequentially.

By philology I was referring to the study of the interpretation of Marx specifically - in my opinion it has produced some fascinating results (see Heinrich above, and importantly The Mismeasure of Wealth, which is a a set of essays by contemporary Marxian philosopher Patrick Murray[0]).

Also of interest is the discussion on Marx's more qualitative points besides his theory of value, specifically his theory of history, alienation, technology etc. for which Gerry Cohen and Sean Sayers have plenty, and Peter Hudis[2] claims from a philological point of view, it is easy to see how the USSR's style of socialism would probably come under fire from Marx himself.

On the whole, I'd just like to conclude with the fact that Marxism is very much not a unified school of thought, and in my modest and relatively uninformed opinion, it has only increased fracturing and has been marred by unfortunate internal hostilities after the 70s in which various philosophers tried to salvage what remained, reinvent, reinterpret or deny the grounds on which famous economists like Paul Samuelson and Piero Sraffa dismissed him. Marxism is so fractured that specifically regional schools have emerged, for instance the Uno School in Japan, AM in the Anglo-Saxon world, the Frankfurt School in 20th c. America, Neue Marx-Lektur in the German world etc.

Despite what it may seem, you asked for what I found worthwhile, but I've replied by citing almost all the authors who I've read at least one work of - I've read so little that I literally can't select what's worthwhile and what's not. This means I'm providing a limited picture, so take what I've said with a Capital-sized grain of salt!

[0] The "dialectical presentation" has come under fire from some Marxists as being insufficiently rigorous, outdated etc. - this is the Analytical Marxist school, which Roberto Veneziani (who you might also refer to on the matter of mathematical Marxism, along with Kliman's easy (but thick) "Reclaiming Marx's Capital") has written about: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2125671

[1] "Probing Marx's dialectical accounts of the commodity, value, money, surplus value, wage labour and capital, The Mismeasure of Wealth establishes Marx's singular relevance for critical social theory today."

[2] Peter Hudis - Marx's concept of the Alternative to Capitalism

I would guess the cost structure of chip manufacturing is heavy towards things other than personnel costs... but is that really so?

Is the waste management more "flexible"? Is it the price of electricity that is cheaper? Or what is it?

Which is the whole Trade War argument about Free market, access and IP. I am not sure how long before the West learn they can expect whatever International "Standard" and "Values" to ever work in China.

I'd expect there's a huge validation stage involved-- flaws in the extraction process could give you a plausible looking but ultimately faulty design to work with, and you have to check and clean that up.

Moreover, if you don't have exactly Intel's fab technology and oral-tradition knowledge, you probably have to retool the design to be more suited to the process you have.

It might still be a boost over whatever they have to offer now, but by the time it hits the market, it would be a generation or two old.

Just to be clear:

Zen microarch design work started circa-2012. The USD$300m deal was circa-4/2016.

It's accurate to say the capital from the deal likely helped AMD finalize, produce, and distribute Zen / Epyc.

But the microarchitecture design innovation predated the cash infusion.

It didn't, it just gave a pass / access to Alibaba and Tencent as well as other Government related project to use AMD CPU.

Look at their balance sheet, and note that without the $300M infusion, the market would have been spooked by their debt levels.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/cash-flow?p=AMD

(So far as I know anyway)

Now Intel has a lot manufacturing based in the US, like I said Congress passed a law to make that happen. But have we looked into why we're allowing Foxconn to get tax breaks to build in "heartland" America but not Intel? An iconic American name?

greed and cheap labor. the exploited become the exploiter.

Should have changed your name for this post that doesn't put Intel in a good light: Just by your posting history they can probably track you down. Black activist--start from there and see if you made any complaints or suggestions to intel. Plus our style of writing is more or less unique.

But I agree with others, Intel management (at a certain point) may have interests that might be against the long term interests of Intel. Say, bonuses. That's the worst, but they may also make mistakes in deciding pro-cons.

Lastly, say that tech is worth $25Billion to Intel, and after x years is essentially worthless. Intel gets $15Billion from China in tax breaks, and sells more than $10B to others meanwhile. So economically it's worth to Intel and China gets the tech. But it is worth to our NatSec?

The Chinese are, along with the Russians, probably at the top of the world's best reverse-engineers. You can bet they'll have already reverse-engineered it even if it wasn't made in their country.

Nationally Walmart is at $11, Target is at $12 and Amazon is at $15. Outside of convenience stores and fast food, increasingly that's your floor now.

Your $9 would actually be $30 / hour, at the absolute minimum. And you'd never get enough employees.

I was getting 12 as a qualified heavy equipment operator not not long ago.

In China and most of Asia, you easily can. While these people won't be MIT grads, you can expect significantly higher scientific temperament compared to $MiddleOfNowhere, Utah.

The reason that Silicon Valley has so many of the Chinese/Indian/Other nationalities is simply because of the volume of available "Good Enough" Engineering talent. In most of these cultures a Master's degree is almost the norm. With this in hand, the practical aspects can often be learnt in training/on-the-job. Given that much of Modern Engineering has been systematically streamlined and commoditized, you really don't need very much "Creative" and "Out-of-the-Box" thinking as much as people who can manage and contribute within the existing framework and systems.

I can't express my distaste such companies any more without entering explicit territory.

You wouldn't but enough people are, apparently, hiring them to do quite a lot of IT work nobody else would touch. Otherwise their business model wouldn't work at all.

Would that be substantially more difficult with the finished product?

The smaller your feature sizes, the higher the probability that opening the chip to reverse engineer the wafer will rip up part of the silicon you're trying to see. The most interesting pieces of an integrated circuit also tend to be thermal hotspots (i.e. the Intel CPU instruction pipeline vs the cache) which are more likely to be destroyed because they use a stronger bonding material.

> I don't think it would be far-fetched to assume that some very protected and valuable IP has leeched through our doors and into China's hands.

China has a "technology transfer policy" for foreign companies doing business in china. So if intel has a fab in china, they agreed to the technology transfer.

> In all honestly I really can't fathom how the American government let this deal occur.

Probably because it benefited US companies and the wealthy.

If china is stealing anything, it's here in the US, not from intel who agreed to trade technology for chinese market access.