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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 underw

by 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.
  - DiogenesKynikos 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. That's exactly what the article you're commenting on is about. An independent organization in Canada just did a teardown of the new Huawei phone, and verified that it's using a new SoC manufactured by SMIC.
    - bArray 3y ago
      From what I understand, they have not yet confirmed this [1]: > TechInsights has received the Huawei Mate 60 Pro in its Ottawa, Canada laboratory. Work has begun to determine if the application processor is indeed SMIC’s latest generation process node – advancing it from its N+1 7nm node found by TechInsights in July 2022 in the MinerVA7 Bitcoin Miner. From what I can tell, Reddit has also mistakenly jumped the gun too [2]. [1] https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-confirming-smic-n2-7nm-huawei-mate-60-pro https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-confirming-sm... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/168wewl/review_of_hisilicon_kirin_9000s_with_its_custom/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/168wewl/review_of...
      - nneonneo 3y ago
        They seem to have confirmed it: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7nm-n2-huawei-mate-60-pro https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7n...
        fspeech 3y ago
        Kirin 9000 was TSMC's 5nm process. The new chip is on a presumed 7nm process and is only 2% bigger, which confirms that for finfet processes transistor density is decoupled from claimed feature size.
        bArray 3y ago
        Than you for the update. I will be keeping an eye on this for further developments.
edwiecron 3y ago
The PowerStar was the i3. This happened this year and there is no mention of it in any articles I see. The fear generated from this story adds a ton of power to things like the CHIPS Act. It benefits manufacturers, pushes a ton of narratives from China, US, Taiwan, Korea, Japan. Kind of a perfect story for so many different players.
- bArray 3y ago
  > The PowerStar was the i3. This happened this year and there is no mention of it in any articles I see. I found some articles on it [1] [2], but not any mentions in these recent articles. Given this history, you can see why there might be some doubt about their ability to produce original products. If they were to for example steal the 5G architecture from another company, you can't be certain they would even report it in fears their stock prices would drop. > The fear generated from this story adds a ton of power to things like the CHIPS Act. It's difficult to say whether the fear is warranted or not. China have blatantly stolen IP for many years now without accountability, and have no plans to stop. [1] https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-new-powerstar-p3-desktop-cpu-looks-just-like-intel-core-i3-10105 https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-new-powerstar-p3-desktop... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-powerstar-p3-01105-cpu-is-a-dead-ringer-for-the-intel-core-i3-10105 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-powerstar-p3-01105...
  - MikePlacid 3y ago
    > If they were to for example steal the 5G architecture from another company What about this article? It says Huawei has the largest 5g patent portfolio in the world: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/huawei-to-start-demanding-5g-royalties-from-smartphone-giants?sref=cD53rqQH#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/huawei-to...
    - bArray 3y ago
      It was just an example and as you suggest, probably not something they are interested in as Huawei was part of the 5G research. A better example might be amd64 acceleration architecture, or Nvidia's CUDA cores. That said, these large companies are highly motivated to patent anything and everything the patent office will accept. It's a broken system anyway, but I can't suggest anything better. The irony of Huawei or any Chinese manufacturer wanting to charge for use of patents is that they have grown by abusing the patents and trademarks of others. Apple for example lost the trademark fight over the use of 'iPhone', despite filing a trademark bid some 8 years prior [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36200481 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36200481

by bArray 3y ago

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.
- DiogenesKynikos 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. That's exactly what the article you're commenting on is about. An independent organization in Canada just did a teardown of the new Huawei phone, and verified that it's using a new SoC manufactured by SMIC.
  - bArray 3y ago
    From what I understand, they have not yet confirmed this [1]: > TechInsights has received the Huawei Mate 60 Pro in its Ottawa, Canada laboratory. Work has begun to determine if the application processor is indeed SMIC’s latest generation process node – advancing it from its N+1 7nm node found by TechInsights in July 2022 in the MinerVA7 Bitcoin Miner. From what I can tell, Reddit has also mistakenly jumped the gun too [2]. [1] https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-confirming-smic-n2-7nm-huawei-mate-60-pro https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-confirming-sm... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/168wewl/review_of_hisilicon_kirin_9000s_with_its_custom/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/168wewl/review_of...
    - nneonneo 3y ago
      They seem to have confirmed it: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7nm-n2-huawei-mate-60-pro https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7n...
      - fspeech 3y ago
        Kirin 9000 was TSMC's 5nm process. The new chip is on a presumed 7nm process and is only 2% bigger, which confirms that for finfet processes transistor density is decoupled from claimed feature size.
      - bArray 3y ago
        Than you for the update. I will be keeping an eye on this for further developments.

edwiecron 3y ago

The PowerStar was the i3. This happened this year and there is no mention of it in any articles I see. The fear generated from this story adds a ton of power to things like the CHIPS Act. It benefits manufacturers, pushes a ton of narratives from China, US, Taiwan, Korea, Japan. Kind of a perfect story for so many different players.

bArray 3y ago
> The PowerStar was the i3. This happened this year and there is no mention of it in any articles I see. I found some articles on it [1] [2], but not any mentions in these recent articles. Given this history, you can see why there might be some doubt about their ability to produce original products. If they were to for example steal the 5G architecture from another company, you can't be certain they would even report it in fears their stock prices would drop. > The fear generated from this story adds a ton of power to things like the CHIPS Act. It's difficult to say whether the fear is warranted or not. China have blatantly stolen IP for many years now without accountability, and have no plans to stop. [1] https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-new-powerstar-p3-desktop-cpu-looks-just-like-intel-core-i3-10105 https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-new-powerstar-p3-desktop... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-powerstar-p3-01105-cpu-is-a-dead-ringer-for-the-intel-core-i3-10105 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-powerstar-p3-01105...
- MikePlacid 3y ago
  > If they were to for example steal the 5G architecture from another company What about this article? It says Huawei has the largest 5g patent portfolio in the world: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/huawei-to-start-demanding-5g-royalties-from-smartphone-giants?sref=cD53rqQH#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/huawei-to...
  - bArray 3y ago
    It was just an example and as you suggest, probably not something they are interested in as Huawei was part of the 5G research. A better example might be amd64 acceleration architecture, or Nvidia's CUDA cores. That said, these large companies are highly motivated to patent anything and everything the patent office will accept. It's a broken system anyway, but I can't suggest anything better. The irony of Huawei or any Chinese manufacturer wanting to charge for use of patents is that they have grown by abusing the patents and trademarks of others. Apple for example lost the trademark fight over the use of 'iPhone', despite filing a trademark bid some 8 years prior [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36200481 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36200481