https://www.quora.com/Why-do-computers-only-use-US-made-processors
Why couldn't any country build microprocessors like Intel and AMD? Why do computers only use US-made processors?
A good question. I’m not an expert, and let me try to answer this in some naive perspective.
- To clarify firstly, other countries do build their own microprocessors
- China’s Longson - Loongson
- Russia's homegrown Elbrus processor and PC would be fantastic
- List of Russian microprocessors
- Microprocessor is indeed a very high-tech product, generally in two-fold:
- Although much is known/public about microprocessor design, the specific technologies/details of making a microprocessor competitive in performance and power are just secrets well kept by Intel/AMD
- Even if one figured out all the details/secrets of the logic here, making a functional equivalent RTL, the translation from RTL to the physical, and the manufacturing process is definitely black ART here, which is also very difficult to reverse engineer. There are reasons why Intel/AMD CPUs can hit up to 4GHz and still keep power consumption sane, compare this with China’s Longson running at a lame 1GHz, and Russian’s Elbrus at 900MHz
- It’s the net result of trillions dollars’ R&D investment along the 40+ years, with a whole market and ecosystem to support. Any sane country will probably think twice before making a decision to make a home-grown microprocessor to compete with the ones that are state of the art. It would simply be much more economic to just purchase those microprocessors commercial wise.
Also, we shall see, with things like ARM’s licensing model, the gap is being much smaller, whoever wants a home-grown CPU can simply rely on the licensing model, taking the CPU core from ARM, and other IPs from those IP vendors, tape out with TSMC, and ta da - you have a decent microprocessor, not necessarily as performant as Intel’s, but would be sufficient in most cases.
Now China/Russia would still keep investing on home-grown microprocessors, but mostly for military/security consideration.