4 ms·

Not to dismiss the hard work the engineers at apple put in but China and Russia hasn't poached as many engineers over the years as Apple has.

nosequel 5y ago
That's correct, China just poaches the tech when it lands on their soil without paying a thing. At least Apple pays those they've poached a salary.
dathinab 5y ago
They also don't use TSMC's sub 10nm nodes. The whole point behind the effort of China and Russia is to have a CPU under their control, starting with the design but also including the manufacturing. And TSMC uses technology for their nodes which is not under their control at all. The amount of expertise China already has and will accumulate in the next decades should not be underestimated.
- astrange 5y ago
  > And TSMC uses technology for their nodes which is not under their control at all. Note it's also not under TSMC's control - a lot of fab technology comes from other suppliers like ASML in Europe.
mananaysiempre 5y ago
The Russian (Soviet, really) digital electronics story is just unimaginably sad. There were plenty of capable electronics engineers (still are, though many of them are languishing in poverty, obscurity, and/or retirement), but the Soviet state essentially shut down all research into original computer architectures in the early 70s after the BESM-6 (q.v.) and proclaimed a strategy of copying Western machines. As will all research, a gap a decade or so long essentially wiped the institutional memory. (Cf. the US rocket engineers forgetting how to build large engines after the ignominious end of the Apollo project, or the US particle physicists largely forgetting how to build particle accelerators after the untimely termination of the SSC.) The closest thing to an original Soviet consumer-oriented computer in 1991 were the Elektronika programmable calculators, which sparked a tremendous following but are downright pitiful compared to contemporary HP designs. For reasons that are unknown to me in detail but probably have to do with the general consumer-hostility of Soviet economic planning and industry, the Soviet Union also never really figured out how to make good ICs (barring the arcane discipline of space-hardened electronics); even separately-packaged transistors were kind of crap for a long time. As for modern Russia, both expected corruption-adjusted research funding and the probability of starting a technology business that would survive the grubby hands of petty officials are best rounded off to zero. There are occasionally some very lucky or very well-connected groups that manage to get some work done, but these are small (reproducing an established technology takes time, but not more than several roomfuls of researchers) and infrequent. Why people (who don’t have a vested interest in them) compare these to Apple or Intel I just can’t understand—this is not at all like 1960s IBM vs the Soviet Union. I say all of this with the greatest respect to the stubborn people who try to do engineering under the current Russian regime. I’m only trying to realistically describe the hand they were dealt and the resulting prospects.

nosequel 5y ago

That's correct, China just poaches the tech when it lands on their soil without paying a thing. At least Apple pays those they've poached a salary.

dathinab 5y ago

They also don't use TSMC's sub 10nm nodes. The whole point behind the effort of China and Russia is to have a CPU under their control, starting with the design but also including the manufacturing. And TSMC uses technology for their nodes which is not under their control at all. The amount of expertise China already has and will accumulate in the next decades should not be underestimated.

astrange 5y ago
> And TSMC uses technology for their nodes which is not under their control at all. Note it's also not under TSMC's control - a lot of fab technology comes from other suppliers like ASML in Europe.

mananaysiempre 5y ago

The Russian (Soviet, really) digital electronics story is just unimaginably sad. There were plenty of capable electronics engineers (still are, though many of them are languishing in poverty, obscurity, and/or retirement), but the Soviet state essentially shut down all research into original computer architectures in the early 70s after the BESM-6 (q.v.) and proclaimed a strategy of copying Western machines. As will all research, a gap a decade or so long essentially wiped the institutional memory. (Cf. the US rocket engineers forgetting how to build large engines after the ignominious end of the Apollo project, or the US particle physicists largely forgetting how to build particle accelerators after the untimely termination of the SSC.) The closest thing to an original Soviet consumer-oriented computer in 1991 were the Elektronika programmable calculators, which sparked a tremendous following but are downright pitiful compared to contemporary HP designs. For reasons that are unknown to me in detail but probably have to do with the general consumer-hostility of Soviet economic planning and industry, the Soviet Union also never really figured out how to make good ICs (barring the arcane discipline of space-hardened electronics); even separately-packaged transistors were kind of crap for a long time. As for modern Russia, both expected corruption-adjusted research funding and the probability of starting a technology business that would survive the grubby hands of petty officials are best rounded off to zero. There are occasionally some very lucky or very well-connected groups that manage to get some work done, but these are small (reproducing an established technology takes time, but not more than several roomfuls of researchers) and infrequent. Why people (who don’t have a vested interest in them) compare these to Apple or Intel I just can’t understand—this is not at all like 1960s IBM vs the Soviet Union. I say all of this with the greatest respect to the stubborn people who try to do engineering under the current Russian regime. I’m only trying to realistically describe the hand they were dealt and the resulting prospects.