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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 ans
by 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 agoFrom 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 agoThey 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 agoKirin 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 agoThan you for the update. I will be keeping an eye on this for further developments.
- DiogenesKynikos 3y agoThe article that this entire thread is about says they've confirmed it.