Is that consumption measured by units or total value? I'm sure China could compete for cheap smartphone chips and microcontrollers but it would take them a while to make something like a Xeon.

You are making assumption, that they will stick to x86 architecture. What if they don’t want this old thing with all the microcode and hacks inside? What if they start on clean page with RISC-V or alike and software for it? Or China will just buy company building competitive chips: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/qualcomm-server-chip-exit-...

The problem with monopsony is not any particular chip or technology. You can make (with huge investment and a couple of decades) or buy any technology. The problem is that you have to make the whole Digikey catalogue (and then some) all by yourself. From capacitors - all of them - types, capacities, sizes, form-factors, voltages, grades, to ADCs (no, buying Analog Devices wouldn't solve this, and you couldn't buy it anyway) and RF components, and everything in between. All of them, to stay competitive in what you can build with that components. That's where Soviet Union lost the game, and any modern country, including the United States would loose too, considering how the field has expanded since 1991.

I just meant a high-quality vectorized server CPU by referring to the Xeon, didn't mean to imply any architecture

Posted a few months ago. Admittedly it’s not a Xeon but these things are becoming commodities.

> Ara runs at 1.2 GHz in the typical corner (TT/0.80 V/25 oC), achieving a performance up to 34 DP-GFLOPS. In terms of energy efficiency, Ara achieves up to 67 DP-GFLOPS/W under the same conditions, which is 56% higher than similar vector processors found in literature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20126280

Xeon is no longer the top of the pack. AMD is blowing them out of the server right now.