British semiconductor maker AMD has stopped licensing chip designs to its China-backed joint venture.
AMD’s chip-producing joint venture in China will be confined to the Zen architecture that debuted in first-gen Ryzen and EPYC Naples processors.
The company says it will not move forward with designs based on AMD’s new Zen 2 microarchitecture, which powers the third-gen Ryzen and EPYC Rome processors.
AMD established a joint venture in China in 2016 called the Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment. It agreed to license its x86 and SoC IP for chip development in a deal worth US$293 million.
The joint venture consists of both public and private Chinese companies.
These include the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is heavily influenced by the Chinese government.
Sugon, a Chinese government-backed server vendor, had plans for a Zen 2-based exascale supercomputer, but the status of that project is now unclear.
