14 ms·
Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips
- bhouston 7y agoI predicted this and it will continue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303157 I think we are in this awkward time where China is shifting from playing catch up to the US to taking more of a lead in some areas that are meaningful. This type of transition is awkward for all involved, but it was going to happen and these sanctions moved it forward a bit. I am still surprised that the sanctions didn't have that much of a financial effect on China or at least us in the west didn't notice it very much.
- wh1t3n01s3 7y agoThe sanctions are not so good for the short term and very bad for the long term
- gretagretagreta 7y agoAnyone has an outline link or something?
- overlordalex 7y agoTry http://archive.is/9jQd1 http://archive.is/9jQd1
- rootsudo 7y agoI checked out a Huawei store - they're the same asthetic as an apple store with a ton more useful tech then an ipod, macbook and imac. The phones were impressive and very affordable. We're talking $200-300 for 6gb ram devices, 128gb storage, etc. Google, Apple are right to be worried.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago* Subsidized by the Chinese govt. and intellectual property stolen from western companies.
- periya 7y agoI’ve no dog in this race but I feel the selective outrage to Huawei and other chines tech companies hypocritical while America consumes more and more goods produced in China without batting an eye.
- deathanatos 7y agoCould someone actually vote with their wallet here and buy an American made — not assembled — phone? (I'm under the impression that the best case is that the parts are fabricated in China and assembled in the US, e.g., Apple phones.)
- onepointsixC 7y agoYou have it backward, the parts themselves are usually created in Fab's outside of China while they are assembled (most labor-intensive process) in China. The whole article is about how Huawei is extremely dependent on components outside of China but has shifted from mostly US chips to EU, Taiwanese, Japanese, and South Korean Chips.
- monocasa 7y agoThe article seems to say that they're mainly shifting to HiSilicon, their in house chip design wing.
- onepointsixC 7y agoUS market has been open, so when a Chinese state-owned entity dumps products American consumers buy said products as they only see a product at a cheaper price. How is that hypocritical? The only thing that has been hypocritical was the Chinese blocking of market access via tariffs and nontraditional market barriers in order to favor local entities while demanding market access to others.
- roenxi 7y agoThe US basically started a slow-motion kidnapping of Meng Wanzhou in December 2018. The ban on US shipments to Huawei might have sped the process up, but I imagine they already saw this as personal. Best of luck to them I say.
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoThis is really impressive for Huawei. I do not mean to say that the trade war between China and the US is the same as the Cold War from before, but I have a fun tidbit to share. One of the more interesting theories I heard for why the US won the Cold War is because Russia struggled to develop IC technology. The Russians were masters of espionage, and I would even give them the edge in mechanical engineering, but the United States' ability to master electrical engineering proved more important. They just couldn't build computers like the US, and computers proved to be wildly important for technological breakthroughs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So... Now that Huawei has figured out how to do it without us, it's really become autonomous. This is great news for China, and will help them enormously in the ongoing trade war. And obviously it's not so great for the US.
- Paraesthetic 7y agoYeah thats all good and well until your realise they are a surveillance distopia, which the west dont care about, at least until they decide to start invading the world via military means rather than just lending countries into crippling debt.
- papito 7y agoThe United States is still better at technology, and Russia is better at espionage. Never underestimate the underdog. There was a massive article on the modern KGB under Putin in 2017(?), I think in the Atlantic. They basically managed to hack into some offline Pentagon systems by distributing infected USB drives around that location, through different outlets, in the hopes that an unsuspecting target will use a USB drive on a secure system, and then insert it on a wired machine. Boom. It worked.
- sansnomme 7y agoSo basically the same trick as Stuxnet?
- t-writescode 7y ago
- beloch 7y agoI'd be curious to know if Huawei phones and network devices are currently being used for surveillance in Hong Kong.
- boomboomsubban 7y agoYes? Surveillance is common worldwide and Huawei is a popular brand in the region. I'm guessing you're curious if the Chinese government is using some hidden backdoor in Huawei products to spy on Hong Kong residents who would otherwise be acting privately.
- geowwy 7y agoIt's safest to assume all your consumer tech is being used by at least 1 major government to surveil you.
- fluffything 7y agoProbably. Snowden showed that every phone in the USA is used for surveillance by the NSA. I don't have any reason to expect China to be any different.
- sebastianconcpt 7y agoExactly. Yet I found NSA surveillance INFINITELY less dangerous than China's.
- downrightmike 7y agoA large part of that is the oversight panel that is in charge of looking at the program has publicly acknowledged that the programs are not finding anything. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nsa-program-stopped-no-terror-attacks-says-white-house-panel-flna2D11783588 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nsa-program-stopped-no-te...
- babayega2 7y agoAs a US citizen maybe. But you know a lot of countries all over the world have more suffered under the US influence than that of China?
- kyboren 7y agoEven if those chips are completely devoid of American-origin IP cores, they almost certainly were designed with American-origin EDA software. I am not sure if such chips would be covered by existing export bans or if EDA software licensing agreements prohibit export of produced design files to countries subject to US export bans. If neither is the case, I expect either or both to change soon.
- Cyph0n 7y agoExcellent point. I would say it would be more impressive if China were to build its own EDA tools. At this point, I think the US should start protecting its EDA companies from Chinese investors.
- monocasa 7y agoI really doubt that the EDA software is really that much of an investment these days. It's the lithography tech that's the real crown jewel, and it is being protected.
- zozbot234 7y agoThe two are quite linked. You can't make a good open EDA package without knowing current design rules and the like, and if you want design rules that aren't old enough to drink you'll be bound by NDAs, as fabs strive to 'protect' every bit of knowledge about their 'crown jewels'.
- monocasa 7y agoSure, the implication though is that if you've got the fab design rules it's not that hard to make the EDA tools. It's not 1982 anymore where the DoD is spending obscene amounts of money to run this on a 10Mhz mainframe.
- Cyph0n 7y ago> I really doubt that the EDA software is really that much of an investment these days If EDA tools were so simple, why don't the big IC design companies -- e.g., Intel, Apple, Samsung -- just build their own in-house tools instead of paying millions in license fees? > It's the lithography tech that's the real crown jewel, and it is being protected. Sure, but lithography tech is useless unless you have access to solid tooling for design verification. In IC design, no one can afford to debug issues after the chip is fabricated. EDA toolchains include complex simulation software that, when combined with fab-provided models, allow you to simulate circuit behavior down to the lowest level.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/utNwf http://archive.is/utNwf
- Proven 7y agoEast European cars used to be made with local parts (don't know if 100% local) but they were still crap. In West Europe communists and leftist anarchists used to buy them as value statement. Maybe the chips are okay (they've done well stealing IP) but I'd expect software to be shittier and riskier to use compared to iOS, so meh. No doubt they do well in 3rd world countries and price-sensitive market segments.
- onepointsixC 7y agoArticles whose content contradict their headlines are rather quite frustrating. The title is "Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips" But the article itself states: "While Huawei hasn’t stopped using American chips entirely, it has reduced its reliance on U.S. suppliers or eliminated U.S. chips in phones launched since May" And it's graph shows significant usage of US chips. I'm sure Huawei is trying it's best to reduce its dependence on US chips, and thanks to access to chips from the EU, Taiwan, JP, it likely will succeed. But I can't help but be annoyed at the thought that Taiwan and Japan are relying on the US to protect them from the same CCP they're short sightedly profiting from.
- siavosh 7y agoI’m sure a lot of this will be up for friendly discussions in the next bilateral trade call.
- martinpw 7y agoThat doesn't seem like a contradiction. The newer phones do not have American chips, which matches the headline that says they have managed to make phones without these chips.
- tomhoward 7y agoYour comment has some validity, but the title doesn't seem false; the key point is that Huawei's new flagship product, the Mate 30... > contained no U.S. parts, according to an analysis by UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solution
- onepointsixC 7y agoI missed the statement on the Mate 30. I guess the chart combined with other parts of the article threw me off.
- idoubtit 7y agoThere is no contradiction. The title, "Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips", is confirmed by the content of the article, including a quote by an analyst: “When Huawei came out with this high-end phone—and this is its flagship—with no U.S. content, that made a pretty big statement.” The title didn't claim that Huawei, for all of its phones, had not used any American chip. It claimed that some of its new phones don't use any. Your claim that "it's (sic) graph shows significant usage of US chips" is wrong. The table shows that for every component that was built by an American firm, they have a non-American alternative. Sometimes American providers are still listed, but the table is not quantitative, so the American chips part still used may be lower than 5%, for all we know after reading this.
- userbinator 7y agoIt's worth noting that Chinese smartphones without any US components have been available for a long time, based around SoCs from Mediatek and Spreadtrum/RDA.
- simonblack 7y ago"Once bitten, twice shy." "Never turn away a paying customer." Once those markets go, they never come back. And you're on the slippery slope to irrelevance.
- pochamago 7y agoThat's a two way street, there are plenty of American companies switching to Philippine or Vietnamese manufacturers that won't ever go back to sourcing from China
- thawaway1837 7y agoYup. So the US has created a new competitor and didn’t gain anything in the bargain other than paying for the transition. It would be one thing if this was done after, say, the TPP that ensured that Phillipines and Vietnam created an IP a regime that protected US company interests before they started manufacturing there, but that’s not what happened.
- m3kw9 7y agoShould add inferior in the sentence
- ummonk 7y agoIn what way is the Mate 30 inferior?
- wolfgang42 7y ago“Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without Inferior American Chips” ?
- madiathomas 7y agoI have a Huawei P30 Lite which I use for work purposes. Build quality is better than Samsung. I prefer using it over my iPhone. It is nowhere near inferior. Did I mention that it is supposed to be a cheap phone but its performance is impressive?
- ausjke 7y agoHuawei had to license synopsys/cadence/mentor to design their chip(which is using ARM core), if US really wants to play hardball Huawei's IC design can be killed nearly instantly once those CAD design software is forbidden. In the meantime I heard Huawei etc bought a few years' license right before the trade war, they're actually well prepared. Another way is to restrict chip manufacturing, Taiwan pretty much owns the best technology for that(TSMC), Intel/Samsung has some, Huawei has none. And you have Android to some degree, without Android there is no Smartphone dominance from China as of now. Open source in general helped China to catch up and overtake the west extremely efficiently, you don't need any business spies anymore, just download/modify/profit. At the moment USA still has the possibility to contain IC ecosystem if it really wants to do that. In 10~20 years it will be a different story though, by then USA might not have much leverage if anything at all left.
- dirtyid 7y ago>At the moment USA still has the possibility to contain IC ecosystem if it really wants to do that It's been doing that nonstop since before Trump, Trump is merely broadcasting the actions publicly. Apart from Fujian Jinhua last year, CFUIUS / DOD / USTrade has blocked many Chinese IC acquisition attempts (including EU owned), last month US pressured TMSC to stop dealing with Huawei, ASML held back EUV delivery shortly after. The way things are escalating, the hypothetical shooting war over Taiwan might be triggered by TSMC drama instead of independence.
- xvilka 7y agoIt's just possible to invest in the open-source solutions then, like e.g. Yosys, SymbiFlow, KiCAD, etc
- baybal2 7y ago> if US really wants to play hardball Huawei's IC design can be killed nearly instantly once those CAD design software is forbidden. Latest versions of Virtuosso are sold in underground passageways in Beijing for $4 a pop
- spectramax 7y agoI am not sure about large companies, essentially every small to mid-sized PCB design/manf company in China uses pirated EDA software, primarily Altium Designer, OrCAD and Mentor Graphics. In fact, piracy of sofware is encouraged by the CCP - I won't name the websites, but in order to get a download link you need a WeChat or Baidu account which is ultimately linked to Citizen ID or Passport through phone number (OTP). Yes, I setup a Windows VM to get access to these sites where you need to install a Baidu download manager in your operating system. There is also specific Chinese forum lingo that is used to thank people who post pirated software ("1st floor", "2nd floor", etc.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Barrin92 7y agoI think the US is making a big mistake by falling back to isolationism and confrontation in a sort of last-ditch attempt to reign Chinese progress in. The prevailing quite chauvinistic attitude among many people outside of Asia is that because of their lack of political liberalism China or other Asian countries will always be stuck with copying or being the manufacturing bench. I think this will turn out to be a grave miscalculation and that the trade wars will only accelerate the decoupling and strengthen the Chinese regime's narrative to develop at all costs. I think many people in the West really are not aware how deeply the resentment goes in Chinese society to not be bullied around ever again, the mentality really is 'better-broken jade than intact tile', and it's hard to compete with that.
- thewileyone 7y agoI agree, many have underestimated China resolve to be number one. Many also don't understand China's history because they've gone through much more suffering than a trade war in the last 50 years.
- throw7 7y agoI'm unable to read the full article (paywall), but going on only the title, this is a good thing.
- krn 7y agoHow likely it is that Huawei got access to the technology behind Samsung's Exynos[1] to speed up the development of their own ARM chips? At least that's what happened with Samsung's foldable screen technology[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-korea-charges-11-with-selling-samsung-technology-to-china https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-kor...
- krn 7y agoWhere I am coming from[1]: > CNEX, a microchip company backed by Microsoft and Dell, has filed new allegations in a Texas lawsuit accusing Chinese tech giant Huawei and one of its executives of stealing trade secrets. > It's the latest filing in a suit set to go to trial June 3. CNEX claims that Huawei spent years trying to steal its data storage secrets. And also[2]: > "We expect other nations will want to become self-sufficient in critical technologies. That's what we'd expect of a responsible government," he said. "The issue isn't that China has set out to do that. It's that part of their industrial policy, part of the way they try to accomplish that, is state-sponsored theft or creating an environment that rewards or turns a blind eye to it." > He pointed to evidence of such behavior allegedly linked to the "Made in China 2025" strategic plan. The Chinese government introduced the plan in 2015, designed to reduce dependence on imported technology in 10 priority industries including robotics, IT, aviation, railway transport and biopharma. "We've charged cases, I believe, in eight of those 10 sectors, IP theft cases," Hickey said. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/huawei-executive-accusetd-of-stealing-trade-secrets-from-axas-company-backed-by-microsoft-and-dell.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/huawei-executive-accusetd-of... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/23/chinese-theft-of-trade-secrets-is-on-the-rise-us-doj-warns.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/23/chinese-theft-of-trade-secre...
- throwGuardian 7y agoThe be honest, American companies never had a monopoly in any of the parts needed to build a commercially viable phone. Unlike say in the PC world, where the dominant OS/Software stack has an almost impenetrable reliance on x86, phones were mostly ARM based (in an attempt to prevent Intel's chokehold). And communication standards require FRAND patent grants allowing anyone to build for the spec. That said, even as recently as a decade back, China was routinely written off as a cheap imitation of US/Japan/Korea in the electronics industry, Huawei & friends have proven otherwise. Their flagships are on par with the Apples and Samsungs, and even lead them on velocity of feature releases, especially hardware
- fluffything 7y ago> Unlike say in the PC world, where the dominant OS/Software stack has an almost impenetrable reliance on x86 Huawei also makes its own x86 chips, GPUs, and even FPGAs (e.g. TPU-like systems), and while Huawei Cloud still runs other vendors hardware, it's becoming more and more "Huawei-hardware only" each quarter. I think the US has not realized yet how good it had it, and how much it has screwed things up. The EU, Russia, India, Japan, and China are all super-dependent on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA's products, and therefore, the US, on many critical sectors. By showing China/Huawei [0] how much this dependence can hurt, the US has forced China to become technologically independent, and if China succeeds, then all other super powers will have a real and viable alternative to US products. Right now, e.g., the EU is on the "let's ban all Huawei products, China spies on us!" boat, but the wind can change very quickly to "let's ball all US products, the NSA spies on us!" any time - it doesn't matter that the actual truth is that, no matter who you buy from, they are going to spy on you. I personally think that it's good for another global player to enter the sector. I don't think it will disrupt it in any major way, but it is already affecting prices, e.g., in the cloud sector, where we are finding out how much are customers willing to pay to "avoid" a Chinese cloud, and it isn't that much. [0] In case you did not know, Huawei _is_ China.
- afroboy 7y agoI thought x86 Chinese license is only for internal government production and not for public?
- t0ddbonzalez 7y agoYet another trade win for the Orange fella...
- vpcs111fm 7y agoDon't worry. Huawei barely gets to manage the fund itself from Chinese banks. And the moment that US DOJ launches secondary boycott on Huawei and its financial affiliates & financiers, believe me -- it won't last months. The most important thing is the financial power. The current wrestle between China and the US (entailing Huawei and Chinese trade deals) is all about the US wanting to forcefully open up Chinese financial markets -- which China will never do. It would be exciting to see how the new trade deals would unfold.