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China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
- shortsunblack 3y agoWhat use are chip factories in the United States when you cannot sell them to the largest market of chips that only will become even more larger as Chinese middle class and their consumption grows?
- algem 3y agoThe point is to have a domestic supply chain independent of other nations. It’s becoming vital for security purposes.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoBy this way of thinking everything is vital for "security purposes" and you end up with a full autarchy. Food is vital because you can't rely on others to feed your population. And so is energy. And so on. What is really going on though is that the US started a trade war with China and it's just another salvo in this war. Soon the US will declare electric cars from China as a "threat" and ban them, too. Probably the Chinese will retaliate with banning Teslas. On the same grounds, too.
- zeroCalories 3y ago? Yes, food and energy are vital to national security, that's why we have stuff like farming subsides. But that's not the only thing that goes into an economy. No one cares that China dominated in polyester production. It makes total sense to guard certain key industries.
- arandomusername 3y agoAre you suggesting a country should be reliant on other countries for food?
- qvrjuec 3y ago...What? There is a spectrum of importance to national security, food and energy are very much on the side of more important, so not sure why you chose those as an example. It's extremely reductive to say any country that imposes limits on trade for its own strategic benefit is an autocracy.
- vundercind 3y agoAutarky, not autocracy. It’s an economic goal of having an economy that can continue to operate fairly well even if foreign trade is restricted. It’s associated (perhaps not exclusively) with fascist movements, which emphasized national independence from the broader world. (I don’t agree that hedging against potential action by a single major strategic adversary is a strong move toward autarky, however—if, say, Canada had tons of fabs instead of the precariously-perched Taiwan, I bet we’d not be spending so much money on them)
- lupusreal 3y agoNot having your country days away from starving if international shipping were disrupted isn't fascism, it's just common sense. Every country that can practically manage to have sufficient domestic food production will do so.
- vundercind 3y agoYeah, of course. I was just correcting the autocracy/autarky mix-up.
- hackerlight 3y agoJapan and Germany both ran out of energy in WW2. Energy sovereignty is a good reason Europe needs to be getting off fossil fuels ASAP.
- philipov 3y agoBanning Teslas sounds like a good idea. Maybe the US should consider leading on that one.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoYou have some points re trade war, that is definitely a thing that is going on. However, the on-shoring of chip production is especially for military strategic purposes. Right now a majority of chip fabs are all in Taiwan, and within striking range of a country that likes to rattle its sabers. Losing Taiwan's fabs would be a problem wrt military supply.
- bobthepanda 3y agoOnshoring is mostly happening because the disruption due to factory/port COVID lockdowns in China, and then all the issues with ports and canals domestically, made it quite clear that the long distance transpacific supply chain cannot be the only option. At least with Mexico and Canada there are dozens of land crossings that can be diverted to. And if you cannot sell for six months due to supply issues but your competitor can you may as well be a sitting duck.
- toasterlovin 3y agoIMO onshoring is mostly happening at this point because of tariffs. The supply chain crisis is over and has been for a while at this point, but everything coming from China is still 25% more expensive than it used to be.
- bobthepanda 3y agoover =/= could never happen again. and it doesn't even have to be the exact same scenario. right now the panama is at lower capacity due to droughts and the red sea leading to the suez is a conflict zone.
- toasterlovin 3y agoYeah, but the problem is that your competitors dictate what you have to do. If they keep their supply chain in Asia because it gives them a significant price advantage, then you're overpriced. For on-shoring to work, you need to be able to survive such a structural disadvantage in the short-term AND the advantage you realize when outlier events happen has to outweigh the structural disadvantage.
- hackerlight 3y agoOr at least within your sphere of influence, e.g Mexico.
- huytersd 3y agoThe other 7 billion people in the world
- echelon 3y agoThe theory is that the Chinese middle class has already peaked given the population decline, economic woes, and shrinking growth of exports to the West. As but one signal, the recent dumping of Chinese EVs has less to do with industrial superiority and more to do with their own shrinking domestic demand. The Chinese market is saturated and consumer demand has slowed. India's growth is predicted to top China's before 2030, and manufacturing is moving on to cheaper cost of labor economies. Mexico, India, Vietnam. Africa won't be far behind. There are plenty of other markets for American tech.
- zeroCalories 3y agoChina is in a weird place that is hard to predict. They have some troubling economic and demographic problems as you said, but also have built up strong tech and manufacturing capabilities. We could easily see China continue to grow in power, even if the middle class continues to be poor.
- hylaride 3y agoChina also has large swaths of it's population still in a lower income bracket, especially the further you get from the coasts (though the demographics there are not much better). It's going to be very interesting to see what happens over the next few decades (and by interesting I hope in not a terrible way). One of the theories of China's recent, intense sabre rattling is that demographically they'll be in no position to militarily take Taiwan in 20 years. So it's now/soon or never.
- riffic 3y ago*its population
- The_Colonel 3y agoChina will be able to easily field ten million soldiers in 20 years. Their military keeps strenghtening. Their demography woes will cause economic and social problems first, not military ones. I believe this supposed rush to take Taiwan is more about Xi's personal ambitions rather than strategic pressure.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoMaking money is not the primary object. Currently chips for civilian and military applications often come out of Taiwan. The strategic and political situation of Taiwan is -fluid. Losing these fabs would be a heavy blow to the west both economically and more importantly qua military defense. Thus extra fabs in other (western) countries are pro-indicated for this reason alone. It's insurance.
- The_Colonel 3y agoLosing Taiwan fabs would have only minimal military impact. Military hardware uses older computing tech, built on larger nodes (its development takes many years / decades). It's also relatively low volume and military can outbid almost any other customer. I believe the importance of Taiwanese fabs is very overstated. Taiwan is mainly a (geo) political matter.
- throwv666 3y agothats how chinese monster has been created
- ravenstine 3y agoWhat's the point of making anything if you can't sell it in China???
- Havoc 3y agoI really just hope consumers will have access to both sides. I know people freak out about hardware backdoors but some of the cheap tech coming out of China sure is cool
- gorjusborg 3y agoYeah, lets make sure the cheap gadgets made under a socio-political system we consider abusive keep coming.
- cinntaile 3y agoAt this point there is no alternative. We need their production capacity so the wheels back home can keep on spinning.
- gorjusborg 3y agoI know you are speaking the truth, at present, but that doesn't mean it is healthy, or that we must accept it as the inevitable future.
- makeitdouble 3y agoThat won't be that cheap for long though (and I don't see that as a bad thing either) Looking at Huawei or Xiaomi goods, the quality is there and the prices are also getting noticeably higher accordingly.
- Havoc 3y agoAgreed though the availability of both would keep prices low by virtue of competition
- candiodari 3y agoThey won't, for the same reason the USSR didn't. The people making these chinese goods are part of the government. They're also part of a government that will literally kill them if they're not the best at everything, and of course they will fuck up some bits. So they will outlaw access to foreign technology, to hide how they're "embarassing the Chinese state". Because totalitarian ideologies ... they can't fix reality, but they can certainly fix the appearance of reality and make the people judging THEM only observe a fixed reality. Plus this is something that "infects" everything. If there is ONE western thing the CCP wants to hide from Chinese, they'll have to cut access to a LOT of western products just to hide a few small things they really don't want to get out (better ballpoint pens in the west perhaps?). It's funny how this starts too. Like in the USSR, in China when it started it was more-or-less positive. They outlawed better products and celebrated chinese industry catching up. Needless to say, they're a government. The focus has shifted to just outlawing better products, and now they're really more often destroying people who help chinese industry catch up, because ... that does the absolute #1 forbidden thing: it gives the wrong politicians a leg up over others. It gives, to be exact, random politicians a leg up over others ... which of course quickly gets a wrong one. Hopefully it'll only mean Chinese people never see western products, unless specific products the party wants them to use. Hopefully we'll retain access to Chinese goods. Though of course, it'll rapidly become INCREDIBLY rewarding for anyone with a great idea to run to the west. In the west, you'll get a great job at the very least. Idea great enough? You get to be rich. You stay in China with a great idea? You get killed ...
- hashtag-til 3y agoWhat are they going to use? RISC-V?
- rwmj 3y agoThat and LoongArch and home-grown Arm chips most likely.
- jdietrich 3y agoZhaoxin have got an x86 ISA license and a respectable microarchitecture implementation.
- sinxccc 3y agoI don't have access behind the paywall. But from the title, if it is only telecom carriers devices, basically RISC-V and ARM chips. Telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE use their own network processor on data plane for a long time, replacing control plane CPU (usually x86 or ARM) is not a big task. Smaller companies who relies on Broadcom solution may have a tough time, but 3 years to find a replacement and finish adaptation is not that hard too.
- nsteel 3y agoBig Chinese carriers like China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom rely on networking gear from Cisco, Nokia, Ericcson etc alongside Huawei, just like European/US carriers do/used to. All those vendors are going to feel losing this market. Personally, I think 3 years to change the hardware at the heart of your product is a huge ask. Although of course it depends on the quality of the replacement.
- tuetuopay 3y agoI think you’re underestimating the CPUs in such telco devices. Even datacenter grade equipment (much easier on the control plane than telco or backbone) come with Xeon chips. Not the best ones, but still full blown server CPUs with heaps of RAM. This is not Arm or risc-v territory (yet), perhaps Ampere devices. However this is approachable by Loongsoon an I’d bet it’s the path they’ll take.
- dehrmann 3y agoIn a surprise to no one. This is just tit for tat in the Trump-Biden trade war with China.
- lupusreal 3y agoChina initiated the "trade war" years before any American politician acknowledged it.
- scrubs 3y agoAgree. You'd have to be a bit stupid not to see the early embrace of China was to collect, learn, and participate with the west to only later excise control then exceed and dominate. Here i want to chastise us (the west) for our money, money, money focus and quarter to quarter focus. China, and I think somewhat to their credit, learned tons from the stupidity of Russians and were never going to be so thoroughly broken. And it's understandable; that's what we'd do. Nonetheless, China isn't so powerful as to dictate terms. It seems like China's risk calculation was suffer short term money loss and foreign products and services now, to make own and control the market access and structure later making back the money.
- roamerz 3y ago>>This is just tit for tat in the Trump-Biden trade war with China Or maybe something more strategic as they ramp up hostilities With Taiwan.
- kkzz99 3y agoChina is fine with the status quo, who isn't fine with that is the US.
- miguelazo 3y agoExactly. The West dictated these same sourcing rules to their critical infrastructure providers years ago.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoArtificially restricting yourself to inferior silicon is a great way to boost your economy. /s
- bayindirh 3y agoRockChip's ARM SoC's are quite fast actually. I run a couple of OrangePi 5Bs which work quite nicely. Mind you these are 4+4 bigLITTLE systems with 35 degrees C idle without any tuning and passive cooling. Huawei is also quite improved on hardware reliability and design department in the last years, so there's no need for concern for them. They still need a Infiniband equivalent network layer for HPC, though.
- redleader55 3y agoI think the poster above was referring to the node size, to which China will not have access because TSMC & Samsung prefer to sell to the West.
- spookie 3y agoTheir media capabilities are quite meh however
- bayindirh 3y agoLet’s take a look: RK3588S: - 8K60P output over HDMI 2.1 - OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.2, Vulkan 1.2 - 6 TOPS AI accelerator with INT4/8/16 support - Real time H265/H264 encoding up to 8K30P, parallel encoding with less resolution, plus decodes tons of format up to 8K, plus JPEG decoder. Details are at https://www.cnx-software.com/pdf/Rockchip%C2%A0RK3588%C2%A0Datasheet%C2%A0V0.1-20210727.pdf https://www.cnx-software.com/pdf/Rockchip%C2%A0RK3588%C2%A0D...
- swed420 3y agoChina's economy seems to be doing just fine https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/04/10/chinas-unfair-overcapacity/ https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/04/10/chinas-unf...
- methuselah_in 3y agoWell, except one country every other is using it?
- Avtomatk 3y agoOne country with 1400 million people
- Tiktaalik 3y agoSeems like a signal that they see the trade consequences of invading Taiwan, and they're going to put things in motion such that they'll be prepared to be able to handle them.
- 0x00_NULL 3y agoThat’s a hilarious directive since their homegrown CPU is 900 MHz. They are on something like a 30nm die. There is just no way they can transition to those chips in modern devices. This sounds like exactly the sort of order that would come from Xi. He’s living in his information bubble and is excited to go to war.
- ajb 3y agoNo, they are not that far behind. You're thinking of Longsoon I guess, but they have a 7nm process at SMIC and Hisilicon designing ARM-based server processors on it[1]. Sure, ARM is western, but guess what, they have the IP anyway, as they required ARM to do business through a subsidiary in China. China is serious about semiconductors. Hisilicon is competitive in many markets. [1]https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/huaweis-new-cpu-matches-zen-3-in-single-core-performance-hisilicon-taishan-v120-server-cpu-benchmark https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/huaweis-new-...
- causi 3y agoIt's also a "so what" situation. If China's economy is severed from the rest of the world's, competitors can't take its market share. Being five or even ten years behind on chips is irrelevant when your consumers can't go elsewhere. What did people use their smartphones for ten years ago? Recording themselves and watching cat videos. What do they do now? You don't need 2nm chips to do anything except take market share from the company using 3nm chips. The F-22 Raptor uses an i960 processor from 1988.
- vouwfietsman 3y agoyes but AI, simulations and supercomputer warfare
- cynicalsecurity 3y agoIt's time for the West to wake up and stop nurturing authoritarian regimes.
- blitzar 3y agoYou are right, banning foreign equipment in your telecoms are the sign of authoritarian regimes. 2020: Telecoms providers must stop installing Huawei equipment in the UK's 5G mobile network from September, the government has said. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55124236 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55124236
- hackerlight 3y agoProtectionism isn't what's being referred to as authoritarianism.
- scrubs 3y ago"You are right, banning foreign equipment in your telecoms are the sign of authoritarian regimes" That's distorted, wrong, and frankly a bit of whining
- qwerty456127 3y agoIt's hard to blame them. Running vital infrastructure on domestic tech seems a sound strategic move.
- osnium123 3y agoIt seems that AMD and Intel are continuing to lose market share between China restrictions and cloud providers designing their own silicon. At some point, you will have a Boeing/Mc Donald Douglas situation where the US government will force AMD to acquire Intel so that both entities can survive.