18 ms·

Huawei teardown shows chip breakthrough

121 points by fspeech 3y ago

geoah 3y ago
https://archive.ph/IOf0f https://archive.ph/IOf0f
sschueller 3y ago
"US-led global campaign to prevent China’s access to cutting-edge technology" I find this attitude from the US government believing that only the US is capable of advanced technology extremely arrogant and foolish. The US may have had an advantage back after WW2 when half the world was in ruins but this has changed a long time ago. The fact that I have to sign an export agreement with Apple because my app uses SSL encryption is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is the fact that I am not even in the US.
- ssss11 3y ago
  All of that is a good point, but in contrast I can’t believe that the West just gave all manufacturing to one country for decades, and everything got copied, and no repercussions happened, for decades……
  - dacryn 3y ago
    short term monetary gain for the politicians and companies? These things were always going to work out for at least another 5 years, likely 10. So why not go for it, earn yourself a few million, and let the next one clean it up? You only need to find a few to make it work.
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    It's simultaneously the most sad and hilarious part about it, the communists didn't need to seize the means of production, it was handed to them on a platter by western capitalists, in the pursuit of short term profit.
  - washadjeffmad 3y ago
    You should be getting a kick out of the rhyme. If the US had cared more about teaching history instead of promoting itself as everyone's savior, I wonder whether so many would have made such predictable blunders. https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol39/iss1/7/ https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol39/iss1/7/
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    ~7% real rate of return on capital means that you are financially irresponsible if you didn't give up manufacturing in exchange for large cost savings. You might see repercussions in 30 years, but by then your savings increased tenfold. That applies just as much to the individual board member as to the government who's #1 priority was GDP growth.
    - ssss11 3y ago
      That’s insightful, thank you
bullen 3y ago
RockChip is also made in mainland. RK3588 is up there to contend with the latest TSMC chips. So is TH1520 that can compete with Raspberry 4 per watt, GPU drivers are still lacking, but progress is being made. Personally I like to keep my devices around 5W so that they can run full speed below 60C without fan; so I'm going with JH7110, I got all my 3x MMO engines to work on my Vision Five 2 last week!
- pmarcelll 3y ago
  According to multiple articles online, the RK3588 is manufactured on Samsung's 8nm process node.
  - bullen 3y ago
    Interesting! Can you link? I guess US can only ban US citizens/companies. So S Korea is still working with China?
janalsncm 3y ago
There is so much hubris online about Chinese R&D. Every conversation about Chinese research papers seems to devolve into accusations of scientific fraud, as if academics aren’t driven by the same incentives and companies can’t tell the difference between real and fake research. The fact is, there are some extremely talented researchers in China, and cutting them off from a specific technology is frankly too little too late. Either the US needs to cool their jingoistic jets a bit or they need to seriously consider whether direct competition is sustainable. Yes, the US has undoubtedly the best higher education system in the world now, but this is largely driven by immigration from China and India. Will this still be the case in 30 years when India and China’s economies have matured and high paying tech jobs can be found elsewhere? Right now the immigration system for technically minded immigrants makes no sense. Rather than providing a path to citizenship, the US is sending some of the most talented individuals back to their old countries, where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US. It’s a terrible strategy that any country not hindered by two year election cycle myopia would rectify.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- piva00 3y ago
  > Right now the immigration system for technically minded immigrants makes no sense. Rather than providing a path to citizenship, the US is sending some of the most talented individuals back to their old countries, where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US. It’s a terrible strategy that any country not hindered by two year election cycle myopia would rectify. It's terrible for the US but at least in terms of fairness to the societies who trained, and exported these minds it's pretty damn good. The US companies extract the value they need/want from these individuals, after their tenure they go back and help to develop their societies which paid for their education/training. It's fair enough, the US is a place for business, that's just business.
- supermatt 3y ago
lnsru 3y ago
It’s a utopia, that sanctions will help keep China in technology research behind. There is no star metal in ASML machines. Same silicon, tightly manufactured mechanical parts. Same laws of physics. One day China will catch up and compete with classical semiconductor companies. It’s actually already happening. See ESP32 wireless microprocessors.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It was the same thing with cryptography export regulations, other countries ended up developing alternatives.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  Espressif is a designer, not a fab.
- Grum9 3y ago
  [dead]
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  More general: as soon as a country (or group of 'friendly nations') reaches a certain technology base, it can start doing things that technology base enables. Will it do so? Of course that also depends on politics & economic factors. This happened for steel smelting, electricity, all sorts of manufacturing, IT, internet access, medicine & so on. Right now, a process node like 7nm is only manufactured in a few places. A decade or 2 from now, that'll likely be a few more (I put my money on India, EU & Brazil. Unsure about Russia given the self-destruct path it has chosen). Some more time, and 7nm is old news that every reasonable tech-able country can do for themselves (should they choose to). Assuming tech keeps advancing, one or 2 high tech hubs will become many.
- est 3y ago
  > ESP32 wireless microprocessors I believe it uses a Tensilica Xtensa LX6, which is not Chinese.
ddxv 3y ago
The US sanctions encouraged the Chinese government to invest even more in it's local brands. Why wouldn't the US government have preferred to keep them dependent on US tech...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- senttoschool 3y ago
  Because US governments are led by 60/70/80 year olds who know nothing about technology. All they've done is weaponize TSMC and Nvidia.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    Do 20/30/40 old politicians know significantly more about technology? I mean, they can hold a phone right but do they know about foundries, cryptography, whatever? Success in their career path depends on their ability to get voted, not on knowing what to do next or their general or specialist knowledge. This is the same for any age group of politicians.
  - quantum_state 3y ago
    The US needs young minds in government to compete effectively… it can no longer afford to have the dinosaurs ruin its future …
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  The US is in a tricky position, China gets the best of both worlds, they buy in US goods when they're better and they build their own when they can. That's an asymmetric advantage China has - since the US doesn't want to buy in Chinese equipment when it's better due to national security concerns. So the US has moved to change that - they'd rather decouple than allow China to more easily reach parity. Yes in the long term this forces China into full self-dependence, but the US has to back itself - does it think it can out-innovate China? You better hope so.
  - 3y ago
ajb 3y ago
The US is literally doing for the Chinese foundry industry what nations often do to develop an advanced industry: force the local economy to use it so it has a revenue source and is protected from foreign competition, so it isn't snuffed out before it can really compete.
- bhouston 3y ago
  100%. China was going to achieve this technology at some point but we we sort of forced them into Manhattan style projects for this as a result of the sanctions. So they are likely going to achieve technology independence from the US faster as a result and then may surpass it clearly if they continue this level of effort/investment. To be fair the state of the art is 3mn as of now (eg iPhone 15 releasing next week or so.) But 7mn is pretty darn close.
  - throwoutway 3y ago
    I struggle to follow along with this. I understand Moore's law, but at what point can we just keep using 7nm for most things instead of always moving down an integer 3>7. How many things will require a 2nm and not be satisfied by a 7nm fab?
    - bhouston 3y ago
      The issue is you can make this claim anywhere over the past 50 years. When you just achieve a new node, you think it isn't yet useful. But what happens is that software starts to take advantage of it and it gives you new types of capabilities you didn't have before. For example, if we never got down to where we are now, we likely wouldn't have LLMs or viable real-time ray tracing or the ability to run various types of photo improvement algorithms on your iPhone to make all your pics look good. Those require significant processing and it wouldn't have been achievable if technology here just stopped a decade ago. If we had stopped CPU progress 25 years ago we would have never gotten smart phones at all. It is hard to know what will be possible in a decade with all the additional compute resources we get from moving down more nodes. But I do expect there to be a lot.
    - 3y ago
korginator 3y ago
Before Covid, we used to have projects with Huawei that needed visits to China, specifically to their HQ in Shenzhen. The calibre of their R&D is nothing short of world class. I've had the pleasure of deep-dive analysis and problem solving with some extremely talented and intelligent minds there. Though we had a language barrier, it became irrelevant after a few discussions. What also amazed me about a company of that size was their decision making process and ability to commit resources and money to actions at very short notice. Their divisions and teams operate in a very autonomous style, and the teams I interacted with were definitely empowered to make strategic calls and commit to them. This may not be true across the whole organisation, but it does broadly appear to be an indicator of their culture. Back then, they were already doing a fair amount of work on upstream cellular networking and related tech around 5G, SOC design, manufacturing processes and improvements, and a whole lot more. They were not shy about discussing sanctions and were (still are) hard at work towards self-sufficiency, sanctions or not. What's happening now was not only expected, it could not have turned out otherwise. Also note, we're hearing about Huawei because they are one of the biggest. There are several other smaller and niche players who are part of the game.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >The calibre of their R&D is nothing short of world class. It's no coincidence that Huawei's global R&D offices are right next to, or even exactly where the likes of Nortel, Nokia, Ericsson, ARM, Imagination, Intel, etc. either used to be or currently are, plus on the campuses of Europe's top EE universities. If there's top talent somewhere, Huawei will invest there, and often pay better than the local competition (Ericsson and Nokia are more akin to body-shops these days).
- korginator 3y ago
  [Edit: sorry, replying to myself because I can't edit the parent post] China launches a $40 billion state fund to boost the chip industry. https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-launch-new-40-bln-state-fund-boost-chip-industry-sources-say-2023-09-05/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-launch-new-40-bln-s... Archive link: https://archive.ph/1lWyv https://archive.ph/1lWyv
- 3y ago
frankreyes 3y ago
It's actually easy to make one advanced chip in a laboratory, but making it at scale is what's difficult. That single chip may cost 10s of k of USD. That's why Taiwan is the world leader: scale.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  China has been making 7nm chips for a long time. This one is a breakthrough because it's a consumer product you can go ahead and buy.
  - frankreyes 3y ago
    Yes, using imported equipment, tools, labour, QA, know how and management staff. They just rubber stamp the made in China seal. And data supports that claim since it's Taiwan the world producer of 7nm chips.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      If you read the article you'll see that the chips in question were manufactured by SMIC and not TSMC.
      - frankreyes 3y ago
        Scale. The point is the scale. You can easily make one wafer in a laboratory, but to make wafers at scale of economics is a totally different thing China: 5% Taiwan + Samsung : 71% https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-world-depends-on-taiwan-for-semiconductors.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-w...
        sudosysgen 3y ago
        A product that is a mass produced and sold on the open market such as a smartphone means mass production.
bArray 3y ago
On the recent podcast 'The China Show' [1], all evidence so far points to their 5G chips that were manufactured and imported from Taiwan just before they underwent sanctions. The chip itself performs like a 2-3 year old chip. It is likely a similar story for the SMIC chip - they 100% do not yet have a 7nm process in mainland China. I think recently China released an "Intel competitor" that turned out to be an old i3 that was de-lidded and had a Chinese name thrown on it, with the firmware reporting rewritten. > It is unclear how many units of the new device Huawei intends to produce. > They also suggested that Huawei may be powering some Mate 60s with chips from TSMC, which it had stockpiled before the US cut off such purchases. You could probably estimate it based on the number of chips they were able to procure prior to sanctions. The other option they have (at incredible cost) is to buy new devices, reverse engineer them, then buy tonnes of them and recover the chips. Put simply, the title is false. This shows that sanctions are working incredibly well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/advpodcasts https://www.youtube.com/advpodcasts
- cyp0633 3y ago
  Die shots definitely can tell more than assumptions, just wait.
  - bArray 3y ago
    Yeah for sure - if people outside of China and their sphere of influence can get hold of a device to do impartial testing. I think we already know what the answer is: 1. China does not have the manufacturing capability to produce chips reliably at this scale. There are multiple key technologies they need that they do not have. 2. Taiwan and other chip manufacturing companies are extremely unlikely to export newer chips to China. The cost of losing business by leaking parts or designs would be exceptionally high. Apple for example would likely pull their production from a manufacturer that started selling chips with the M1 architecture to third-parties without permission. 3. There was very little boasting from the phone manufacturer, something you would expect when it is so closely tied to the CCP. Instead we see lots of smaller, apparently independent news sources reporting on this. It appears neither Huawei or the CCP want to directly break this news, as they know it will backfire. 4. They appear to be limited in numbers, likely due to supply issues. If these are new chips hot off the press, you would expect they would have got large batches made to fulfil their own needs and to sell them into the market. Everything points to this being pure posturing.
seydor 3y ago
Cold war is back. Yay!
giardini 3y ago
The article talks about 7 nm technology. I thought the current races were at smaller sizes, i.e., in 5, 3 and even 2 nm tech? IBM revealed a 2 nm chip two years ago: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-05-06-IBM-Unveils-Worlds-First-2-Nanometer-Chip-Technology,-Opening-a-New-Frontier-for-Semiconductors https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-05-06-IBM-Unveils-Worlds-First... Producing a single chip is far from mass production but two years! And here we're yakking about 7-nm tech?
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  The article is about the chips found in the Mate 60 Pro, a consumer device sold on the open market.
ericfrazier 3y ago
Societies with freedom of thought will always surpass scientific output of Communism.
- timbit42 3y ago
  It's not the communism that restricts freedom of thought in China but the dictatorship at the top. True communism (and socialism) are democracies and permit freedom of thought. Actually, communism and socialism are more democratic than capitalist societies because even the workplaces are democratic. Capitalist workplaces are dictatorships. Some day the world will see dictatorial workplaces like we see slavery today and capitalism will end.
known 3y ago
[dead]

121 points by fspeech 3y ago

https://archive.ph/IOf0f https://archive.ph/IOf0f

"US-led global campaign to prevent China’s access to cutting-edge technology" I find this attitude from the US government believing that only the US is capable of advanced technology extremely arrogant and foolish. The US may have had an advantage back after WW2 when half the world was in ruins but this has changed a long time ago. The fact that I have to sign an export agreement with Apple because my app uses SSL encryption is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is the fact that I am not even in the US.

ssss11 3y ago
All of that is a good point, but in contrast I can’t believe that the West just gave all manufacturing to one country for decades, and everything got copied, and no repercussions happened, for decades……
- dacryn 3y ago
  short term monetary gain for the politicians and companies? These things were always going to work out for at least another 5 years, likely 10. So why not go for it, earn yourself a few million, and let the next one clean it up? You only need to find a few to make it work.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  It's simultaneously the most sad and hilarious part about it, the communists didn't need to seize the means of production, it was handed to them on a platter by western capitalists, in the pursuit of short term profit.
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  You should be getting a kick out of the rhyme. If the US had cared more about teaching history instead of promoting itself as everyone's savior, I wonder whether so many would have made such predictable blunders. https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol39/iss1/7/ https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol39/iss1/7/
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  ~7% real rate of return on capital means that you are financially irresponsible if you didn't give up manufacturing in exchange for large cost savings. You might see repercussions in 30 years, but by then your savings increased tenfold. That applies just as much to the individual board member as to the government who's #1 priority was GDP growth.
  - ssss11 3y ago
    That’s insightful, thank you

bullen 3y ago

RockChip is also made in mainland. RK3588 is up there to contend with the latest TSMC chips. So is TH1520 that can compete with Raspberry 4 per watt, GPU drivers are still lacking, but progress is being made. Personally I like to keep my devices around 5W so that they can run full speed below 60C without fan; so I'm going with JH7110, I got all my 3x MMO engines to work on my Vision Five 2 last week!

pmarcelll 3y ago
According to multiple articles online, the RK3588 is manufactured on Samsung's 8nm process node.
- bullen 3y ago
  Interesting! Can you link? I guess US can only ban US citizens/companies. So S Korea is still working with China?

janalsncm 3y ago

There is so much hubris online about Chinese R&D. Every conversation about Chinese research papers seems to devolve into accusations of scientific fraud, as if academics aren’t driven by the same incentives and companies can’t tell the difference between real and fake research. The fact is, there are some extremely talented researchers in China, and cutting them off from a specific technology is frankly too little too late. Either the US needs to cool their jingoistic jets a bit or they need to seriously consider whether direct competition is sustainable. Yes, the US has undoubtedly the best higher education system in the world now, but this is largely driven by immigration from China and India. Will this still be the case in 30 years when India and China’s economies have matured and high paying tech jobs can be found elsewhere? Right now the immigration system for technically minded immigrants makes no sense. Rather than providing a path to citizenship, the US is sending some of the most talented individuals back to their old countries, where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US. It’s a terrible strategy that any country not hindered by two year election cycle myopia would rectify.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
piva00 3y ago
> Right now the immigration system for technically minded immigrants makes no sense. Rather than providing a path to citizenship, the US is sending some of the most talented individuals back to their old countries, where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US. It’s a terrible strategy that any country not hindered by two year election cycle myopia would rectify. It's terrible for the US but at least in terms of fairness to the societies who trained, and exported these minds it's pretty damn good. The US companies extract the value they need/want from these individuals, after their tenure they go back and help to develop their societies which paid for their education/training. It's fair enough, the US is a place for business, that's just business.
supermatt 3y ago

lnsru 3y ago

It’s a utopia, that sanctions will help keep China in technology research behind. There is no star metal in ASML machines. Same silicon, tightly manufactured mechanical parts. Same laws of physics. One day China will catch up and compete with classical semiconductor companies. It’s actually already happening. See ESP32 wireless microprocessors.

pjmlp 3y ago
It was the same thing with cryptography export regulations, other countries ended up developing alternatives.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Espressif is a designer, not a fab.
Grum9 3y ago
[dead]
RetroTechie 3y ago
More general: as soon as a country (or group of 'friendly nations') reaches a certain technology base, it can start doing things that technology base enables. Will it do so? Of course that also depends on politics & economic factors. This happened for steel smelting, electricity, all sorts of manufacturing, IT, internet access, medicine & so on. Right now, a process node like 7nm is only manufactured in a few places. A decade or 2 from now, that'll likely be a few more (I put my money on India, EU & Brazil. Unsure about Russia given the self-destruct path it has chosen). Some more time, and 7nm is old news that every reasonable tech-able country can do for themselves (should they choose to). Assuming tech keeps advancing, one or 2 high tech hubs will become many.
est 3y ago
> ESP32 wireless microprocessors I believe it uses a Tensilica Xtensa LX6, which is not Chinese.

ddxv 3y ago

The US sanctions encouraged the Chinese government to invest even more in it's local brands. Why wouldn't the US government have preferred to keep them dependent on US tech...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
senttoschool 3y ago
Because US governments are led by 60/70/80 year olds who know nothing about technology. All they've done is weaponize TSMC and Nvidia.
- pmontra 3y ago
  Do 20/30/40 old politicians know significantly more about technology? I mean, they can hold a phone right but do they know about foundries, cryptography, whatever? Success in their career path depends on their ability to get voted, not on knowing what to do next or their general or specialist knowledge. This is the same for any age group of politicians.
- quantum_state 3y ago
  The US needs young minds in government to compete effectively… it can no longer afford to have the dinosaurs ruin its future …
SilverBirch 3y ago
The US is in a tricky position, China gets the best of both worlds, they buy in US goods when they're better and they build their own when they can. That's an asymmetric advantage China has - since the US doesn't want to buy in Chinese equipment when it's better due to national security concerns. So the US has moved to change that - they'd rather decouple than allow China to more easily reach parity. Yes in the long term this forces China into full self-dependence, but the US has to back itself - does it think it can out-innovate China? You better hope so.
- 3y ago

ajb 3y ago

The US is literally doing for the Chinese foundry industry what nations often do to develop an advanced industry: force the local economy to use it so it has a revenue source and is protected from foreign competition, so it isn't snuffed out before it can really compete.

bhouston 3y ago
100%. China was going to achieve this technology at some point but we we sort of forced them into Manhattan style projects for this as a result of the sanctions. So they are likely going to achieve technology independence from the US faster as a result and then may surpass it clearly if they continue this level of effort/investment. To be fair the state of the art is 3mn as of now (eg iPhone 15 releasing next week or so.) But 7mn is pretty darn close.
- throwoutway 3y ago
  I struggle to follow along with this. I understand Moore's law, but at what point can we just keep using 7nm for most things instead of always moving down an integer 3>7. How many things will require a 2nm and not be satisfied by a 7nm fab?
  - bhouston 3y ago
    The issue is you can make this claim anywhere over the past 50 years. When you just achieve a new node, you think it isn't yet useful. But what happens is that software starts to take advantage of it and it gives you new types of capabilities you didn't have before. For example, if we never got down to where we are now, we likely wouldn't have LLMs or viable real-time ray tracing or the ability to run various types of photo improvement algorithms on your iPhone to make all your pics look good. Those require significant processing and it wouldn't have been achievable if technology here just stopped a decade ago. If we had stopped CPU progress 25 years ago we would have never gotten smart phones at all. It is hard to know what will be possible in a decade with all the additional compute resources we get from moving down more nodes. But I do expect there to be a lot.
  - 3y ago

korginator 3y ago

Before Covid, we used to have projects with Huawei that needed visits to China, specifically to their HQ in Shenzhen. The calibre of their R&D is nothing short of world class. I've had the pleasure of deep-dive analysis and problem solving with some extremely talented and intelligent minds there. Though we had a language barrier, it became irrelevant after a few discussions. What also amazed me about a company of that size was their decision making process and ability to commit resources and money to actions at very short notice. Their divisions and teams operate in a very autonomous style, and the teams I interacted with were definitely empowered to make strategic calls and commit to them. This may not be true across the whole organisation, but it does broadly appear to be an indicator of their culture. Back then, they were already doing a fair amount of work on upstream cellular networking and related tech around 5G, SOC design, manufacturing processes and improvements, and a whole lot more. They were not shy about discussing sanctions and were (still are) hard at work towards self-sufficiency, sanctions or not. What's happening now was not only expected, it could not have turned out otherwise. Also note, we're hearing about Huawei because they are one of the biggest. There are several other smaller and niche players who are part of the game.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>The calibre of their R&D is nothing short of world class. It's no coincidence that Huawei's global R&D offices are right next to, or even exactly where the likes of Nortel, Nokia, Ericsson, ARM, Imagination, Intel, etc. either used to be or currently are, plus on the campuses of Europe's top EE universities. If there's top talent somewhere, Huawei will invest there, and often pay better than the local competition (Ericsson and Nokia are more akin to body-shops these days).
korginator 3y ago
[Edit: sorry, replying to myself because I can't edit the parent post] China launches a $40 billion state fund to boost the chip industry. https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-launch-new-40-bln-state-fund-boost-chip-industry-sources-say-2023-09-05/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-launch-new-40-bln-s... Archive link: https://archive.ph/1lWyv https://archive.ph/1lWyv
3y ago

frankreyes 3y ago

It's actually easy to make one advanced chip in a laboratory, but making it at scale is what's difficult. That single chip may cost 10s of k of USD. That's why Taiwan is the world leader: scale.

sudosysgen 3y ago
China has been making 7nm chips for a long time. This one is a breakthrough because it's a consumer product you can go ahead and buy.
- frankreyes 3y ago
  Yes, using imported equipment, tools, labour, QA, know how and management staff. They just rubber stamp the made in China seal. And data supports that claim since it's Taiwan the world producer of 7nm chips.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    If you read the article you'll see that the chips in question were manufactured by SMIC and not TSMC.
    - frankreyes 3y ago
      Scale. The point is the scale. You can easily make one wafer in a laboratory, but to make wafers at scale of economics is a totally different thing China: 5% Taiwan + Samsung : 71% https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-world-depends-on-taiwan-for-semiconductors.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-w...
      - sudosysgen 3y ago
        A product that is a mass produced and sold on the open market such as a smartphone means mass production.

bArray 3y ago

On the recent podcast 'The China Show' [1], all evidence so far points to their 5G chips that were manufactured and imported from Taiwan just before they underwent sanctions. The chip itself performs like a 2-3 year old chip. It is likely a similar story for the SMIC chip - they 100% do not yet have a 7nm process in mainland China. I think recently China released an "Intel competitor" that turned out to be an old i3 that was de-lidded and had a Chinese name thrown on it, with the firmware reporting rewritten. > It is unclear how many units of the new device Huawei intends to produce. > They also suggested that Huawei may be powering some Mate 60s with chips from TSMC, which it had stockpiled before the US cut off such purchases. You could probably estimate it based on the number of chips they were able to procure prior to sanctions. The other option they have (at incredible cost) is to buy new devices, reverse engineer them, then buy tonnes of them and recover the chips. Put simply, the title is false. This shows that sanctions are working incredibly well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/advpodcasts https://www.youtube.com/advpodcasts

cyp0633 3y ago
Die shots definitely can tell more than assumptions, just wait.
- bArray 3y ago
  Yeah for sure - if people outside of China and their sphere of influence can get hold of a device to do impartial testing. I think we already know what the answer is: 1. China does not have the manufacturing capability to produce chips reliably at this scale. There are multiple key technologies they need that they do not have. 2. Taiwan and other chip manufacturing companies are extremely unlikely to export newer chips to China. The cost of losing business by leaking parts or designs would be exceptionally high. Apple for example would likely pull their production from a manufacturer that started selling chips with the M1 architecture to third-parties without permission. 3. There was very little boasting from the phone manufacturer, something you would expect when it is so closely tied to the CCP. Instead we see lots of smaller, apparently independent news sources reporting on this. It appears neither Huawei or the CCP want to directly break this news, as they know it will backfire. 4. They appear to be limited in numbers, likely due to supply issues. If these are new chips hot off the press, you would expect they would have got large batches made to fulfil their own needs and to sell them into the market. Everything points to this being pure posturing.

seydor 3y ago

Cold war is back. Yay!

giardini 3y ago

The article talks about 7 nm technology. I thought the current races were at smaller sizes, i.e., in 5, 3 and even 2 nm tech? IBM revealed a 2 nm chip two years ago: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-05-06-IBM-Unveils-Worlds-First-2-Nanometer-Chip-Technology,-Opening-a-New-Frontier-for-Semiconductors https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-05-06-IBM-Unveils-Worlds-First... Producing a single chip is far from mass production but two years! And here we're yakking about 7-nm tech?

sudosysgen 3y ago
The article is about the chips found in the Mate 60 Pro, a consumer device sold on the open market.

ericfrazier 3y ago

Societies with freedom of thought will always surpass scientific output of Communism.

timbit42 3y ago
It's not the communism that restricts freedom of thought in China but the dictatorship at the top. True communism (and socialism) are democracies and permit freedom of thought. Actually, communism and socialism are more democratic than capitalist societies because even the workplaces are democratic. Capitalist workplaces are dictatorships. Some day the world will see dictatorial workplaces like we see slavery today and capitalism will end.

known 3y ago

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