News on China's scientific and technological development.

Design activity -- constructing an artifact description satisfying given goals and constraints -- distinguishes humanity from other animals and traditional machines, and endowing machines with design abilities at the human level or beyond has been a long-term pursuit. Though machines have already demonstrated their abilities in designing new materials, proteins, and computer programs with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, the search space for designing such objects is relatively small, and thus, "Can machines design like humans?" remains an open question. To explore the boundary of machine design, here we present a new AI approach to automatically design a central processing unit (CPU), the brain of a computer, and one of the world's most intricate devices humanity have ever designed. This approach generates the circuit logic, which is represented by a graph structure called Binary Speculation Diagram (BSD), of the CPU design from only external input-output observations instead of formal program code. During the generation of BSD, Monte Carlo-based expansion and the distance of Boolean functions are used to guarantee accuracy and efficiency, respectively. By efficiently exploring a search space of unprecedented size 10^{10^{540}}, which is the largest one of all machine-designed objects to our best knowledge, and thus pushing the limits of machine design, our approach generates an industrial-scale RISC-V CPU within only 5 hours. The taped-out CPU successfully runs the Linux operating system and performs comparably against the human-designed Intel 80486SX CPU. In addition to learning the world's first CPU only from input-output observations, which may reform the semiconductor industry by significantly reducing the design cycle, our approach even autonomously discovers human knowledge of the von Neumann architecture.

Click to expand...

curiouscat said:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

HP is following in Dell’s footsteps and shifting almost all manufacturing completely out of China. This leaves Lenovo as the last globally competitive business PC maker that will keep the majority of its manufacturing in China.

IMO this creates a big sanction risk for Lenovo. I believe the presence of HP and Dell manufacturing in China was a big reason for the US to avoid sanctions on the export of all x86 CPUs to China. If both Dell and HP are gone that makes potentially crippling sanctions on Lenovo a lot more likely.

Click to expand...

ansy1968 said:

From what I heard majority are owned by foreigners and beside others will fill the slack. There is Huawei, Xiaomi and BKK may enter the market cause PC is a commoditized product. And there is ASUS, man they are inching to get back and the mainland market will help them achieved their goal.

And to tell you the truth I once a HP user, 4 out of 5, recently I bought a Huawei Matebook, the problem I have with HP is their battery life is to short and are prone to heating.

Click to expand...

curiouscat said:

I think the main issue is that the Chinese companies have almost no global market share with the exception of Lenovo compared to HP and Dell. So there’s no way they’re going to be able to fill the the slack unless they manage to take marketshare from HP and Dell globally which is a tough ask especially for business computing. This makes it a lot more tempting for the US to sanction Lenovo too since now the damage from the sanctions would primarily hit China.

Yeah I’m not a fan of HP laptops either I keep on hearing that HP stands for horrible product from some of our IT staff lol

Click to expand...

curiouscat said:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

HP is following in Dell’s footsteps and shifting almost all manufacturing completely out of China. This leaves Lenovo as the last globally competitive business PC maker that will keep the majority of its manufacturing in China.

IMO this creates a big sanction risk for Lenovo. I believe the presence of HP and Dell manufacturing in China was a big reason for the US to avoid sanctions on the export of all x86 CPUs to China. If both Dell and HP are gone that makes potentially crippling sanctions on Lenovo a lot more likely.

Click to expand...

curiouscat said:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

HP is following in Dell’s footsteps and shifting almost all manufacturing completely out of China. This leaves Lenovo as the last globally competitive business PC maker that will keep the majority of its manufacturing in China.

IMO this creates a big sanction risk for Lenovo. I believe the presence of HP and Dell manufacturing in China was a big reason for the US to avoid sanctions on the export of all x86 CPUs to China. If both Dell and HP are gone that makes potentially crippling sanctions on Lenovo a lot more likely.

Click to expand...

curiouscat said:

I think the main issue is that the Chinese companies have almost no global market share with the exception of Lenovo compared to HP and Dell. So there’s no way they’re going to be able to fill the the slack unless they manage to take marketshare from HP and Dell globally which is a tough ask especially for business computing. This makes it a lot more tempting for the US to sanction Lenovo too since now the damage from the sanctions would primarily hit China.

Yeah I’m not a fan of HP laptops either I keep on hearing that HP stands for horrible product from some of our IT staff lol

Click to expand...