What's the deal with the municipal government being a partner in this project? Is that structure common in china? Is it just them giving VIA tax breaks and things, or are they more involved than that?
Seems like it depends on the price point. These chips might be slow by modern standards, but if they're cheap enough then it doesn't really matter for a lot of the potential applications. I'm typing this post on a chip that is roughly in that performance bracket (an i5-3750k) that only rarely feels like the bottleneck. And this is my gaming machine.
Plus the vast majority of work computers don’t need to be particularly fast. Add a lightweight Linux distro, and that’s more than enough for paperwork.
Early into high school, I needed something to take to class, but since I already had a decent desktop at home, plus we were broke, I picked up some cheap Asus K55N; AMD A8-4500M, 4GB DDR3, etc -- nothing particularly fancy; only upgrade I did to it was removing the mechanical hard drive and swapping in my old 120GB Corsair Force GT.
I eventually upgraded, went off to university, etc. When I finally came home, I found out my mom apparently "borrowed" it, figured out how to install Ubuntu, and has been using it ever since for grading papers and what not.
No idea how much longer it will remain in use, but aside from the awful screen, ironically, honestly, I think the browser and the seemingly ever increasing resource requirements of the web will eventually be the only thing that finally causes an upgrade.
I've got a desktop with a Core2Quad Q9300, originally built in 2008. Updated the motherboard in 2010 to one with USB3, updated the GPU in 2012. Kept using that machine as my daily-driver until 2020, when I built my current desktop. The only real reason that I did that was to improve gaming performance. The machine itself still functions fine on the modern web (using an up-to-date Linux distro, of course). 8GB of RAM used to feel like a monster.
I'm running a well-optimized 2014 Haswell I5-4590 system with a Radeon 7800 XT in my virtual pinball cabinet. It's handling real-time 3D at 1440p 120fps at medium-high settings and VPX is pretty CPU heavy. My system is probably only a generation or two ahead of the one described (although it's true that Haswell was one of those occasional Intel generations that became legendary for outperforming and generally aging very well).
That's very lopsided in favor of the GPU - if VPX is more CPU intensive that the average video game you could probably swap the 7800 xt for something much cheaper and get the same performance.
Yes, I agree. I was actually planning to retire that mobo and CPU after the GFX upgrade but that damn Haswell is so good, I didn't need to. The previous GFX card (a 1080) was the bottleneck getting 120fps reliably. I really didn't expect the i5-4590 to keep up with 120fps at low latency but got surprised.
Yeah it is pretty common. Governments invest in key area corporations to provide fund, tax breaks, regulatory aid and a bunch of other benefits, and sometimes sell its chunk of shares in a few years.
One early example is Chongqing government with Huang Qifan as mayor back in the 2010s.
Do governments allow some of their employees to be highly compensated relative to others? Would someone with real expertise in chip development work for the government at what the government is willing to pay? I think the answer is no.
The Chinese government has definitely "bought back" some top talent from the US. It's probably a small number of people.
I'm not sure why local governments would get involved although in general China has had a problem with too much investment and not enough places for it to go. It's not impossible that there are essentially local sovereign wealth funds.
This initiative seems to be a private company propped up by government funds rather than direct government employment. Think Lockheed Martin not DARPA.
