this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2022
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In discussing this the other day I came to a question about the semi-conductor topic in relation to this "Pivot to Taiwan."
There's very clearly a profit motive involved, with Taiwan producing a lot of computer chips and the US based companies needing to maintain control of this profit stream moving forward, particularly given the growth and technological improvement of the mainland Chinese semi-conductor industry.
What I have started to wonder about is how much this may also have to do with the hardware level backdoors implemented in nearly every western designed processor. If China takes over as the semi-conductor supplier of the world (either via mainland production or the reintegration of Taiwan), these hardware backdoors will be very quickly removed, or at the very least adapted to the needs of the Chinese people instead of American imperialists.
I think that makes sense from an imperialist point of view, especially one where the cracks are becoming blindingly apparent. Control of information is everything.
It's not just about control for the sake of protecting profits, it's about control for the sake of protecting information. These backdoors enable access to private/personal information on nearly any device, or to dictate what functions those devices are allowed to perform.
There is no doubt that there backdoors built into these hardware but the extent to which the US state has control over these backdoors is not very clear. At least I haven't been able to find out some info about it.
Either way, I don't think the backdoor aspect is as important as the monopoly angle. The entire world is dependent on Intel and AMD to perform computations. It is hard to overstate how important computation is for the economy to function especially ones like China where there is more planning and technology is deployed everyday for both convenience and governance.
There is also ARM. Nearly all my servers use ARM chips. I only have one Intel server and it's not even a new chip (3rd gen i7).
Where do you get decent arm servers for cheap? I'm building a xeon workstation.
Well, they won't be as powerful as a Xeon system. That is why I have my one intel server. Most of the services I run (I run 26 services), can run on low-power hardware easily (things like Invidious, Homeassistant, Cockpit, Node Red, Jellyfin, etc.). For these, I have SBCs. I currently run 9 Raspberry Pi 4s (8 as webservers, one as a recursive DNS server with Pi-Hole in front of it), 2 Pine H64s (one as my reverse proxy that provides access to the rest of my servers and one as my TV box running Kodi), and a RockPro64 handling more intensive stuff like the Matrix homeserver. My Intel machine is an old Mac Mini which I've upgraded the storage (500GB HDD to 1TB SSD) and RAM (4GB to 16GB) on and installed Debian. On that, I run things that require either a lot of power or a lot of storage. For example, my Mac Mini hosts Gitea, Minio (open source Amazon S3 clone), Code Server (Online IDE), Nextcloud, Onlyoffice, and a Minecraft server.
SBCs are nice because they are cheap and very low power. All my servers connect to a single <$100 UPS and that lasts over an hour. Of course, the downside is that if you have a single service that needs a lot of compute power, you'll need to use a separate server for that, which is what my Mac Mini is for.
Edit: By the way, I've seen you on Matrix. My username on there is Heisenbug.