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Article says 92% of leading edge chips are from Taiwan. What counts as leading edge, and what percentage of lagging edge chips come from China? Aka what total

Article says 92% of leading edge chips are from Taiwan. What counts as leading edge, and what percentage of lagging edge chips come from China? Aka what total percentage of chip supply would be disrupted by China invading Taiwan assuming embargoes between the US and China is still an anticipated response to that…

anovikov 2y ago
U.S. makes about half of the chips it consumes. But none of them are leading-edge. Which makes me assume that U.S. is about or almost self-sufficient in much older ones. That will hardly help much though. Happily, at least West produces entire set of tools needed to produce the chips. So Taiwan is just a matter of cost. At higher prices, they will be made elsewhere when needed, in some time - there's no barrier to that.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Taiwan is just a matter of cost Just because you can manufacture lathes doesn't mean you can turn e.g. a Turner's Cube [1]. (Scalpels: surgeons, et cetera.) [1] https://www.instructables.com/Turners-Cube-Manual-Machine/ https://www.instructables.com/Turners-Cube-Manual-Machine/
- re-thc 2y ago
  > So Taiwan is just a matter of cost If that was the case, Intel would have thrown all their $$$ in and won already. Not so simple.
dotnet00 2y ago
In terms of leading edge, we're talking all AMD CPUs, all of the high end NVIDIA GPUs, all of Apple's M-series chips and iPhone chips, Qualcomm's fastest/most efficient mobile chipsets and more. Lagging edge chips from China that are commonly used in the west are typically on larger nodes that can be more easily replaced (the tech is easier to replicate, the costs are much lower), stuff like microcontrollers, MEMS sensors, ADCs, DACs etc, stuff that doesn't have to be the absolute fastest it can be, just has to work well and be cheap.
qp11 2y ago
We already got a glimpse during covid. Sky is not going to fall. Looks like they are making noise so China makes some sort of deal with industry, that the spice shall flow come what may.
pjc50 2y ago
> Aka what total percentage of chip supply Given what happened during COVID, and how any advanced consumer product contains multiple chips, I suspect you'd see most consumer electronics more complicated than a toaster would become unavailable for months to years, including cars. It's also highly likely that one of the parties, or even just a rogue Taiwanese nationalist officer, would destroy the fab rather than allow it to be captured. (Yes, all of this can be moved to different fabs and can be switched to different parts .. but those are time consuming and expensive things to do! Especially when everyone else is trying to do them as well. Expect a "we can't bring up the fab because we can't source PCs" moment.) Don't forget that if this particular balloon goes up most electronics assembly capacity becomes unavailable as well, because it was in Shenzen.
- iwontberude 2y ago
  Yeah losing many thousands of young men to capture an island with diminished strategic importance may cause a bit of a continuity problem for the CCP leadership. Sure it’s useful for defending China from eastern invasion, but no one is invading China anytime soon.
  - randomopining 2y ago
    Most will probably come from non-major cities and towns so I doubt it will be a problem. CCP knows they can take stuff pretty far. Probably only food production and fossil fuels are their chokepoints.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > Yeah losing many thousands of young men to capture an island Just like Russia, do not underestimate the level of disinterest by the leadership in how many of their pawns survive.
- tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  Turns out hoarding old Xeon CPU's and servers for the homelab has suddenly become a national strategic asset if Taiwan TSMC gets hit
lmpdev 2y ago
I’d imagine it would be the bifurcation of the chip market between low and high transistor size scales You’d be surprised the volume of chips anywhere from the 10s to thousands of nanometers sold even today For every bleeding edge CPU there are many larger (and hotter) less crucial chips being sold If you want to get nitpicky you could consider individual PMOS or NMOS transistors as 10 to 20 million nm single transistor chips (or 1-2cms) It’s exactly the same process after all!

anovikov 2y ago

U.S. makes about half of the chips it consumes. But none of them are leading-edge. Which makes me assume that U.S. is about or almost self-sufficient in much older ones. That will hardly help much though. Happily, at least West produces entire set of tools needed to produce the chips. So Taiwan is just a matter of cost. At higher prices, they will be made elsewhere when needed, in some time - there's no barrier to that.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Taiwan is just a matter of cost Just because you can manufacture lathes doesn't mean you can turn e.g. a Turner's Cube [1]. (Scalpels: surgeons, et cetera.) [1] https://www.instructables.com/Turners-Cube-Manual-Machine/ https://www.instructables.com/Turners-Cube-Manual-Machine/
re-thc 2y ago
> So Taiwan is just a matter of cost If that was the case, Intel would have thrown all their $$$ in and won already. Not so simple.

dotnet00 2y ago

In terms of leading edge, we're talking all AMD CPUs, all of the high end NVIDIA GPUs, all of Apple's M-series chips and iPhone chips, Qualcomm's fastest/most efficient mobile chipsets and more. Lagging edge chips from China that are commonly used in the west are typically on larger nodes that can be more easily replaced (the tech is easier to replicate, the costs are much lower), stuff like microcontrollers, MEMS sensors, ADCs, DACs etc, stuff that doesn't have to be the absolute fastest it can be, just has to work well and be cheap.

qp11 2y ago

We already got a glimpse during covid. Sky is not going to fall. Looks like they are making noise so China makes some sort of deal with industry, that the spice shall flow come what may.

pjc50 2y ago

> Aka what total percentage of chip supply Given what happened during COVID, and how any advanced consumer product contains multiple chips, I suspect you'd see most consumer electronics more complicated than a toaster would become unavailable for months to years, including cars. It's also highly likely that one of the parties, or even just a rogue Taiwanese nationalist officer, would destroy the fab rather than allow it to be captured. (Yes, all of this can be moved to different fabs and can be switched to different parts .. but those are time consuming and expensive things to do! Especially when everyone else is trying to do them as well. Expect a "we can't bring up the fab because we can't source PCs" moment.) Don't forget that if this particular balloon goes up most electronics assembly capacity becomes unavailable as well, because it was in Shenzen.

iwontberude 2y ago
Yeah losing many thousands of young men to capture an island with diminished strategic importance may cause a bit of a continuity problem for the CCP leadership. Sure it’s useful for defending China from eastern invasion, but no one is invading China anytime soon.
- randomopining 2y ago
  Most will probably come from non-major cities and towns so I doubt it will be a problem. CCP knows they can take stuff pretty far. Probably only food production and fossil fuels are their chokepoints.
- pjc50 2y ago
  > Yeah losing many thousands of young men to capture an island Just like Russia, do not underestimate the level of disinterest by the leadership in how many of their pawns survive.
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Turns out hoarding old Xeon CPU's and servers for the homelab has suddenly become a national strategic asset if Taiwan TSMC gets hit

lmpdev 2y ago

I’d imagine it would be the bifurcation of the chip market between low and high transistor size scales You’d be surprised the volume of chips anywhere from the 10s to thousands of nanometers sold even today For every bleeding edge CPU there are many larger (and hotter) less crucial chips being sold If you want to get nitpicky you could consider individual PMOS or NMOS transistors as 10 to 20 million nm single transistor chips (or 1-2cms) It’s exactly the same process after all!