I think I'm a clone now: Chinese AMD Epyc-like server chips appear in China. What gives?

Re: Backdoors

Yeah. I replied to that, but got completely the wrong end of the stick. Re-reading it, I see you're proposing the Mobile Oppression Palace, where a handful of dignitaries can subjugate an entire planet for pennies a day.

Nothing stops any Dell competitor slapping an X470 board in a box and marketing it as a superior product.

Nothing forces you to buy from Del/HPl if you can secure better value elsewhere.

I'm sure HP and Dell would sell you a Ryzen box if they thought it was profitable.

"Hopefully AMD will make enough money from this to survive whatever Intel's next anti competitive action to keep AMD out of the market is."

Actually Intel isn't likely to do anything severely "anti competitive". A duopoly is a great place for both Intel and AMD. Should AMD fail, Intel would be in the highly problematic situation of having a monopoly. That means regulation and perhaps even breakup of Intel. Giving a couple of percents of revenue to AMD is a low price to pay to keep that out.

The netlist is not where you would hide your backdoor. That would be both hard and dangerous to do. The far better place is to put it into any kind of "security" subsystem, as that makes it far easier to get it working and won't ruin your chip if it doesn't work. Simply put, if you already have a seperate CPU on the die, it's far simpler to make that one send out memory regions than to somehow modify the main CPU in a way that it only misbehaves in certain situations while still passing all the tests.

Re: Contradictory

They can replace the built-in encryption accelerators and random number generators with their own. The way the US has been putting back doors into systems is to get people who work for them (either openly or clandestinely) on industry standards boards and get subtle weaknesses introduced into the standards. They also bribed American companies to implement these backdoored standards and then certified them as "secure" in order to get them adopted in the market.

These weaknesses make encryption easier to crack. You couldn't prove the standards had a back door unless you knew what the back door was, and independent cryptographers who thought things looked more then a bit fishy were dismissed as tin foil hat wearers. Then it all came out in a set of leaks a few years ago.

How that relates to CPUs is, how do you know that the encryption acceleration or random number generator built into an Intel CPU doesn't have a similar US government backdoor built into it? You don't, which is why Linux kernel devs don't trust the built-in random number generator for use in encryption. They only use it as one of a number of different sources of randomness specifically because of the threat of US back doors.

So, the Chinese can replace the encryption accelerators and random number generators in AMD CPUs with their own. They may possibly Chinese back doors instead of American back doors, but at least they know the US government won't be reading all their encrypted messages. That isn't an assurance that the rest of the world doesn't have.

Oh, and if the Americans have back doors in Intel CPUs, then the Russians and a number of other countries probably have managed to get themselves a copy of the same keys as well, one way or another.