Article is misleading, this is in terms of chip design, not in terms of equipment manufacturing which is what they need to scale or improve yield. SMIC has the

Article is misleading, this is in terms of chip design, not in terms of equipment manufacturing which is what they need to scale or improve yield. SMIC has the equipment they bought before sanctions and no ability to make new comparable or better equipment. So really, this is just SMIC squeezing a little more out of what they already have. Their yield still sucks and can’t be dramatically improved. Also, 7nm mainstream cpu made by TSMC was released 2018