When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All • Hacker News Board

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#31

Post by noisy_boy » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

China is a peculiar case. It has embraced parts of capitalism that ensure market growth. The huge domestic market coupled with aggressive stealing of IP to create cheapest-in-the-world knock-offs have fuelled its exports. However, having this selective breed of capitalism has allowed its leadership to sidestep aspects of American capitalism e.g. influence of corporations on leaders. This means that companies don't have the same lobbying power in influencing policy/laws/IP etc. So basically we have this wealthy nation with its leadership not generally obliged to listen to either market or its people. So they do what they want to do.

Its like the skinny kid hit the gym, made a ton of money and is now back in the neighbourhood throwing its weight around.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#32

Post by Buge » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #17

> But my guess is that if the American ride-sharing company had been more successful, China would have put a Mao-sized thumb on the scales. Anyone remember when GM had to be bailed out, but at the time, they were actually generating profits in China and it was one of their few bright spots? Ford likewise. I just don't buy this.

Well some members of my family own a factory making car parts. Many parts ship to Ford plants in China. China recently created a new rule saying Ford cannot buy parts from the US. So we either had to build a plant in China, or stop shipping to Ford. We stopped shipping to Ford. They were our largest customer.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#33

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

skynetv2 wrote: post #10

sunstone wrote: post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, coolin…

[deleted]

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#34

Post by cptskippy » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:33 PM UTC

batbomb wrote: post #22

skynetv2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, coolin…

Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources. At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.

Many of them are assembled and then quickly disassembled so that their parts can be used elsewhere. That's pretty much how IBM rolls.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#35

Post by Zafira » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #26

batbomb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources. At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.

You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.

The political will in the West is lacking to move fast in recent decades and really support these kinds of projects. The CCP has something to prove, though, and right now they'll displace entire communities, disappear anyone who objects and destroy historic sites if that's what it takes for certain projects to get built.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#36

Post by klodolph » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

skynetv2 wrote: post #10

sunstone wrote: post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, coolin…

You're looking at the PR, look at the actual technology.

Anyone can build a big enough supercomputer if you throw enough money at the problem. This high level of spending is getting hard to justify, however, because most of the problems you want to solve can't be solved just by throwing another order of magnitude of computing power at the problem. Building a supercomputer becomes a bit of a boondoggle, a public-relations move.

But China can't build the components for those supercomputers. Nobody can build all of them, but China can't fab the processors. Search for "list of semiconductor fabs", find a table, sort by node, and then scroll down until you find a Chinese node that does something other than just churn out flash memory. You'll find SMIC with a couple 40nm or 45nm fabs. That's not just the last generation of tech, that's three generations old (14 [current] => 22 => 32 => 45).

By comparison, the market is flooded with cheap 32nm Xeons being dumped from our data centers.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#37

Post by smallnamespace » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

noisy_boy wrote: post #31

China is a peculiar case. It has embraced parts of capitalism that ensure market growth. The huge domestic market coupled with aggressive stealing of IP to create cheapest-in-the-world knock-offs have fuelled its exports. However, having this selective breed of capitalism has allowed its leadership to sidestep aspects of American capitalism e.g. influence of corporations on leaders. This means that companies don't ha…

> However, having this selective breed of capitalism has allowed its leadership to sidestep aspects of American capitalism e.g. influence of corporations on leaders

This is not a surprise if you understand China's political culture and its long, long history.

For literally thousands of years, political elites in China have understood that political power follows economic power, which is why the richest in China are generally Party members and high officials.

When Deng Xiaoping said "let some people get rich first", he meant those with political connections.

American politicians and citizens allowing corporate interests to slowly take over the political process is due to not understanding how history works.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#38

Post by ptero » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #20

sunstone wrote: post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

A lot of the consumer tech I like the most is Chinese made: laptops, smartphones, cars, drones. Another decade of this trend and China will have all production engineering knowledge in the world and the US and Europe none. Maybe China stacks the cards in its home market, but its not like the US (and other Western countries) doesn't.

China IMO has mastered efficient (low cost) scalable production of standard components. This is the ticket for mass produced consumer tech. Low wage was one of the big drives of this which might change in the near/mid term.

If the age of custom built products does appear this may put another damper on China insustrial production growth. In either case, next 10-15 years should be very interesting, hopefully in a good way (disruptions that are uncomfortable, but not crippling and lead to better setup in the end).

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#39

Post by itchyouch » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #26

batbomb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources. At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.

You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.

They are running in startup mode. Things can be done very quickly as long as red tape doesn't hinder the speed of development. With having experience building everything for everyone, it's not surprising that they can build very quickly.

They have ridiculous manpower at their factories working 24/7 to make billions of phones, utilizing that type of experience to fabricate couple hundreds of thousands of chips to build a super computer can probably take a couple of months. Assembly is probably another couple months and getting the software in order is probably another couple of months.

Now if it was a US gov't contract, it would probably take a decade...

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#40

Post by twblalock » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

Zafira wrote: post #35

twblalock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.

The political will in the West is lacking to move fast in recent decades and really support these kinds of projects. The CCP has something to prove, though, and right now they'll displace entire communities, disappear anyone who objects and destroy historic sites if that's what it takes for certain projects to get built.

That doesn't mean this isn't impressive. What's your point?