Chinese high-tech companies such as Alibaba’s T-Head are unable to buy advanced CPUs and GPUs from American companies such as AMD, Intel, and Nvidia due to the recently imposed export control rules. Chinese entities are also apparently unable to license leading-edge CPU IP from Arm because of the same rules and the Wassenaar arrangement.
According to a report from Financial Times, Chinese companies cannot get access to Arm’s advanced Neoverse V-series CPU IP due to export control rules of the U.S. and U.K. as well as the Wassenaar arrangement on export controls for dual-use goods and technologies and conventional arms. Arm’s Neoverse V1 and Neoverse V2 CPU core IP is designed to enable high-performance computing applications, including supercomputers.
Arm does not sell processors, but licenses designs that power system-on-chips which can be used to build everything from smartphones to supercomputers. The recently set U.S. export regulations prohibit shipping American technologies that enable supercomputers with performance of over 100 FP64 PetaFLOPS or over 200 FP32 PetaFLOPS within a 41,600 cubic feet (1178 cubic meters) or smaller envelope to China. Arm’s high-end Neoverse V-series designs are considered an American technology, and, as a result, Arm cannot license its designs to Chinese entities.
The Arm Neoverse V-series designs can are aimed at HPC processors for supercomputers and and can be used to develop nuclear weapons — so they are subject to both the recently-imposed U.S. technology export rules as well as the Wassenaar arrangement.
China’s high-tech titan Alibaba made a splash when it unveiled its 128-core Yitian 710 server processor for cloud workloads last year and even set an integer performance records with the chip, a result which eventually was expelled from rankings due to lack of availability. But Alibaba could not use Arm’s Neoverse V for its SoC. Instead, it used an undisclosed Armv9 core, which is either its own design or a custom implementation of an Arm Cortex core based on the latest instruction set from the British company — possibly a Neoverse N-series, if we had to guess.
“We feel that the western world sees us as second-class people,” an engineer from Alibaba’s T-Head told Financial Times. “They won’t sell good products to us even if we have money.”
Alibaba’s engineers and managers have reason to worry. Amazon Web Services has been using Arm’s Neoverse V-series cores in its Graviton SoCs for some time and therefore had an advantage over Alibaba’s cloud services.
A source close to Arm told Financial Times that the company was working with Alibaba and other customers from China to find solutions that would enable them to meet their performance goals while also complying with both the Wassenaar arrangement and the latest U.S. export regulations.
