AMD–Chinese joint venture


The AMD–Chinese joint venture is the agreement between the semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices and China-based partners to license and build x86-compatible CPUs for the Chinese-based market. It is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology, as well potentially a response to the 2018 trade war between the US and China. It is similar to the Zhaoxin joint venture supported by VIA Technologies.

Structure

AMD has received permission from the US Department of Defence and Department of Commerce to export the Zen 1 core design to China. Due to legal restrictions AMD has set up multiple companies to allow licensing of x86 technology to China. The overarching joint venture is the Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co. Ltd.. THATIC is owned by "AMD and both public and private Chinese companies, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences": however it is reportedly majority owned by AMD.
2 further joint-ventures have been set-up: Haiguang Microelectronics Co. Ltd., and Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit Design Co., Ltd. AMD and THATIC own differing proportions of these companies. HMC owns the local intellectual property of the chip and subcontracts the manufacturing of the chip. Hygon designs the chip and markets and sells the processors.

History

The joint venture was announced by AMD in 2016. The first processor was released in 2018. At the Computex 2019 trade show, AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed that the licence will be limited to the original Zen architecture, and would not be extended to Zen 2.
On June 24, 2019 the US government placed one of the parent companies, and thus the joint venture, on its export control Entity List, which bans further technology transfers from AMD and possibly hampers its existing operations. The opinion of Anandtech is that further AMD involvement in the joint venture will be minimal due to the ban.

Microprocessors

The initial microprocessor created in 2018 is the Hygon Dhyana system on a chip. It is noted to be a variant of the AMD EPYC and is so similar that "there is little to no differentiation between the chips." It has been noted that there is "less than 200 lines of new kernel code" for Linux kernel support, and that the Dhyana is "mostly a re-branded Zen CPU for the Chinese server market."
Testing in 2020 suggested that "integer performance is essentially identical, however the floating point performance has been reduced" from the equivalent Zen 1 processor. The cryptography extensions have been changed to Chinese versions.