I think the plan is to defend, with allies motivated by the goal of saving TSMC facilities. If you destroy them the moment China declares war, Taiwanese allies might be much less invested

But at the same time everyone understands that the Taiwanese would destroy the facilities before they fall into Chinese hands

As an American, what are ways in which you can not defer to an authority - in a way that actually matters? Sure, you can choose to go outside dressed in gaudy colors, or not dressed at all if you are in SF. Or choose to flip the Democrat/Republican bit once every 4 years (usually without any effect on domestic or foreign policy, though not lately). But in a regular person's life, what authority do you want to opt out of? The average person can't do a thing about their HOA board, let alone a government representative.

Really? Surely it can't be unfamiliar at least.

Also the US has very publicly shown they don’t have the ability to effectively wage war over any period of time.

For any critical workload a chip is considered trash after 5-7 years. They still run , of course, but increased incidents on platforms that are supposed to be 99.99 are hard to work with. Now if you mean there’s unused stock of those , that would maybe work, but I am not aware of significant unused stocks.

“It’s not a vulnerability, it’s a feature!”

Get off the short bus twin. CPU backdoors do no good unless there is cooperation with network driver code or the CPU itself has full operating system with a full network stack.

Intel's ME comes really close to that, but I don't think Intel's ME has drivers for every possible NIC and bus a NIC can appear on in its little Minix. So, just put a Broadcom NIC in a PCIe slot and leave the Intel onboard NIC empty, or LAN facing only.

Xiaomi may get Chinese 4G/5G baseband chip manufacturers to put in backdoors in Chinese phones, but they're not needed - the Chinese government pretty much already has total control of its Internet. For other countries, how are they going to make Qualcomm provide something undocumented CPU instructions can access.

You can refute their statement without personal attacks.

Not knowing a thing makes someone uninformed, not retarded.

My retardation status is unrelated to my statement. You assert there are top secret register values but without any evidence beyond your most recent psilocybin trip.

The existence of undocumented hardware behavior isn't proof of anything.

And are you aware of any? If nobody can find evidence then it's probably not a widespread risk.

Are there any documented cases of backdoors being present in Chinese hardware at time of manufacturing?

Too many propoganda leads to expressions like yours. Sorry your story has zero foundation and is fox news quality.

Hopefully the same pushback that has so far stopped the worst of chat control would help. But even if not having more western alternatives would be very welcome. If you're in the US it may not resonate with you, but as a Canadian currently reading ongoing rhetoric about being annexed by the US I'd love to have options if things continue to go south with the status quo.