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TSMC cuts off client after discovering chips sent to Huawei
- bb88 2y agohttps://archive.ph/wCreq https://archive.ph/wCreq
- wordofx 2y agoHauwei back to 10yo old tech now that it can’t pass off TSMC tech as its own.
- misiu1 2y agoIs there evidence of this
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rapsey 2y agoChina is not that far behind and likely to catch up. The entire US STEM workforce is how many STEM graduates China has per year. The US sanctions is just a stumbling block and will result in a stronger China down the line, with a completely independent supply chain.
- hackernewds 2y agoNot to mention a ton of the US STEM workforce is not American / is Chinese origin. when the incentives align not only will they leave, they will also take all their learnings with them.
- throwaway2037 2y agoBy this logic, why doesn't the US or China have their own equivalent of ASML or TSMC? Number of STEM grads means little if the quality is low. See other developing countries in South/East Asia that pump out lots of low quality engineers.
- rapsey 2y agoThe quality is no longer low. That was true 10 years ago. Since then China has made significant progress and is on the forefront. China has their own ASML and TSMC, they are just behind. But not as far as the west likes to think. The problem with US is that Google and finance pay engineers too much. They get the most talent so they can show you better ads and make better trading algos. In the US the government works against you, whereas in China the regulation burden is none.
- nneonneo 2y agoCorrection: in China the regulation burden is none until they disappear your CEO.
- carlmr 2y ago>See other developing countries in South/East Asia that pump out lots of low quality engineers. South Asia sure, large quantity, low (average) quality. East Asia if you include Japan and Korea has pretty good engineering talent, I'd say, lots of people would run circles there around US graduates, it's more that their economies are hampered in other ways by demographic shifts, bad investing environment (Japan mostly), and monopolies that don't innovate and control the government (mainly Korea). Chinese engineering is pretty damn good now. But it takes time still to catch up to the highest levels of technology, but they have a government investing in its people, in its infrastructure, in its companies. The only question is whether the government will run out of money before the plan unfolds or the demographic time bomb hits.
- throwaway2037 2y agoJapan, Korea, and Taiwan are no longer considered developing countries. I was being very specific about STEM grads in developing countries. From first hand experience, yes, there are "diamonds in the rough", but the average/median STEM grad is much lower quality from South/Southeast/East Asian developing countries _compared_ to their developed counterparts.
- 2y ago
- ptek 2y agoIf you have 10 y/o tech with todays code and algorithms, surely you could modify and improve 3G and get better speeds / quality? My iPhone 6S drops to 3G all the time. As long as you cut all the bloat (i.e tracking code in html..). At the end of the day it all depends on the person and their skill level using the tech.
- spacebanana7 2y agoIn fairness it can be hard for a vendor / platform like Huwawei to cut the bloat, because so much of it sits at the application layer. Users will blame you if Jira works more slowly on your devices than on Apple’s.
- jszymborski 2y agoI'm out of my depth here, but I wonder that, since microchips are finding their way into all manner of places they shouldn't (e.g. Shahed drones and Russian missles), how hard would it be for batch identifiers to be made into the silicon. They can then be cross-ref'd to clients. I know instances of Easter eggs finding their way into chips back in the day. Feels possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art
- rightbyte 2y agoYou can probably engrave with a laser. That art is fixed. But I don't think we need more ways for the US gov. to track us.
- Sabinus 2y agoPhysical identifiers on the chip to identify the company of purchase isn't going to help the US government track you, they have far more useful methods.
- rightbyte 2y agoJust becouse they have far more useful methods I am not very keen on another one. There would have to be some 'know you customer' type of tracking for ordering from electronics suppliers to avoid liability. Like with banks. DigiKey rejecting your order because who knows what their black box said. It would hardly help versus people that can afford front buyers anyway. And even if it would work the microchips still end up in bombs dropped on children since the gov. hand them over willingly in the first place.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- kayson 2y agoThis is often done already. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if this is how they track things down. Silicon die usually have some burnable fuses that can be set once and at some point during manufacturing the wafer lot number and even XY coordinates of the die on the wafer are recorded. It helps track down yield issues.
- parhamn 2y agoHauwei ships 12 million phones per quarter [1]. If even a small percent of them included these chips, it should be pretty damn obvious no? [1] https://huaweicentral.com/huaweis-global-smartphone-shipments-hit-new-records-in-q2-2024-techinsights/ https://huaweicentral.com/huaweis-global-smartphone-shipment...
- greenknight 2y ago12 million, say its 1% thats 120k phones. https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/manufacturing/fab_capacity#:~:text=Annual%20capacity%20of%20the%20manufacturing,inch%20equivalent%20wafers%20in%202023 https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/manufacturing/.... TSMC produced in 2023 16 million wafers, apples die size is about 105mm2 which fits around 230 chips per wafer... say its 200 good chips... thats 3.2 billion chips. 3.2B to 120k is a rounding error.
- parhamn 2y agoTIL thanks
- gruez 2y agoAren't the chips in question used for AI accelerators rather than phones? Moreover for phones SIMC is probably competitive at the mid end range, which makes up most of their sales.
- Sabinus 2y agoIn a global trading environment, sanctions regimes are an added cost to procurement you impose on adversaries, not an impenetrable denial of materials. Huawei can't cost compete if it has to smuggle chips constantly.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Huawei can't cost compete if it has to smuggle chips constantly It also trashes their R&D. Imagine if every LLM researcher in America had to smuggle in Iranian cores to do any work. One of the saddest stories of the 21st century is China’s decline into despotism. They didn’t have democracy, but they had internal political competition and a peaceful transfer of power. In an alternate world, Xi is comfortably retired while China and America drive a new century of human prosperity.
- eunos 2y ago> Xi is comfortably retired while China and America drive a new century of human prosperity They told the same during the Hu era and they will write the same to Xi successor. The enmity is structural.
- roenxi 2y agoThat sounds like it'd be something of a non-issue. If a GPU researcher wants a GPU someone will be willing to smuggle it out for them. Like GP says, a sanctions wall is penetrable. The problem would be more that leading researchers at something like China's OpenAI can't procure a billion dollars worth of GPUs for industrial research. Although I do want to endorse the idea that their political system is probably going to undermine the successes of their businesses. From the outside it looks like a disaster waiting to happen.
- justahuman74 2y agoThe smuggling increases costs though. They may have only so much budget - perhaps the sanctioned-country researcher could only afford an H100 now instead of an H200 if you had excluded the smuggling > their political system is probably going to undermine the successes of their businesses I do agree with this
- heroprotagonist 2y agoFrankly, the US government should be doing more at this point. All departments, not just legislative or executive. Defense, intelligence, state, education, energy.. It is not unbelievable for the race to AGI (or whatever close enough approximation of it is necessary for dominance) to possibly be a "first to the posts wins forever" sort of race. We can't even secure our key technologies. Security at TSMC being a consideration, but not just them. The US is allowing NVIDIA to keep selling strategic assets to whoever can afford them, like they're selling mining picks in a gold rush. The legislation to restrict their sales to China was almost laughable. NVIDIA actively worked to do the bare minimum to comply with it. China is still a key market for them. I've seen projections of $12bn in sales of AI chips to China (though this is hearsay from financial news sites). Is that really a long term profit motive, pissing off the US government who will inevitably investigate their monopoly in the space one day. Good monopolies, like the cable companies that enable mass surveillance on the population, get to entrench to the point that no level of incompetence can unseat them. I'm sure they could use a little "AI safety" legislation that only their graphics cards can provide. Or is NVIDIA's motive political neutrality? Hedge their bets and hope they can balance on the tightrope long enough for a few political cycles to make the US forget, while avoiding alienating China due to the possibility China will eventually win the race? There are constant reports of industrial espionage, both within the US and all along our critical supply chain internationally. Admittedly, it's a lot easier to steal from an open society than a closed, homogeneous one. But where are the armies of advisors to assess critical infrastructure or even help assess threats on an ongoing basis. We should _almost_ be treating our and our allies high tech industrial infrastructure like they are weapon and munitions factories in a wartime environment. But assuming we're still at the start of the race, and not quite at that level yet -- there doesn't seem much fostering of future development going on to properly position the US for success. Specifically, development of companies and of future talent. There's no industrial knowledge-share program (think, 'open source initiative for critical algorithms and tech, but only for allies, and only for those who can meet security criteria'). There's no equivalent of anything like the Manhattan Project. AGI _will_ have the same, if not higher, social and political impact than the Manhattan Project. Instead we've got... DARPA, running years behind the curve as always. They're not an organization to win a race. As far as future talent goes.. There are no special schools or training programs to develop talented youth into important contributors in the space. We can't even get autistic savants through school or into those places they'll potentially thrive or work magic in. Particularly if they happen to have been born poor or can't properly navigate a social system. Even above-average, over-achieving kids aren't being incentivized to focus their development into areas of strategic interest. We're leaving our talent pool to the market, which operates way too late to properly foster early development, and leaving too much early development up to broken or ineffective educational institutions. China has a much larger pool of talent to develop. They have a more directive government with long term planning capacity. They have a much stronger industrial base that is only lacking some key technologies. They've got enough electrical power, or at least capacity to develop it, to run all the hardware. They have much better industrial espionage and cyber capabilities. We have.. a short lead in knowledge. Industrial deals with key allies that are dependent on a dollar that is frankly at risk of collapse any year now with no plan in sight for getting national debt to where we could conceivably be able to pay off _the interest_ on it. A few individual talents pushing forward the technology. The willingness of billionaires to open their wallets for a ton of useless things in hope of striking a rich vein of something salable. A political system which will reward said billionaires for that investment by not taxing their profits towards a social safety net for those who will inevitably be displaced by more productive technologies. To simplify that, almost the only thing we have driving the bus at this point is corporate greed. What kind of AGI will come out of that? Will it be better than an over-controlling one which is personally and politically manipulative, that is feared will come out of China? Anyway. That's my not-so-crazy rant for the day.
- feverzsj 2y agoTaiwan and China's economies heavily rely on each other. I won't be surprised if Taiwan companies are still sending chips or technologies to China.
- robjan 2y agoThe chips go to China regardless since most US technology is assembled in China.
- geopopol 2y agoThere is no sanction preventing Taiwan from trading with mainland China. In fact it's their largest export market. Once there, those chips are used to build Western-branded products, Chinese-branded products and some, I'm sure, are re-exported to Russia.
- walterbell 2y agoStep right up to the Silicon Pillow Fight™ Dec 2023, https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/uschina-chip-sanctions-are-more-like-a-pillow-fight-than-a-war https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/usc... > there is a functioning system in place where companies request permission to sell certain products to China, and the DoC approves exports of products that offer lower performance but still belong to the latest generation of technologies developed in the U.S.. the idea of a strict ban on advanced technology exports to China does not match reality.. "There are Swiss cheese holes in it. And right now, chipmakers are driving cars through them." Hopefully the Linux kernel does not become theatrical collateral damage, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41919670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41919670
- justahuman74 2y agoWatch the linux foundation eventually move to Switzerland like the RISC-V foundation did
- azinman2 2y agoAnd then watch a parallel structure emergence from China that usurps it all.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago[flagged]
- ianeigorndua 2y ago[flagged]
- rgreekguy 2y agoDo you know how I can report a comment for ~~being too American~~ providing nothing in the discussion (at best)?
- ianeigorndua 2y agoThat is a false dichotomy. You are blonded by your hate for USA. You must have bean groomed by the communists. (I am not American)
- throwaway2037 2y agoWhat is the Xiaomi 3nm breakthrough? I couldn't find anything about it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: TSMC told US of chip in Huawei product after TechInsights finding, source says https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41917990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41917990
- known 2y ago[dead]
- surfpel 2y agoThis is a strange time to be imposing chip sanctions, given AI isn’t at the forefront at real scale yet. They’re still able to access compute now, albeit at a higher cost. But in the future when scale and margins are much more relevant than today, that won’t be the case. Market forces to develop IC tech (lithography, foundries, patents, etc..) inside China are surging. So by the time they really need quantity, it’s much more likely they’ll have a domestic high end IC supply chain implemented. Obviously nobody could really predict the timelines with good certainty, but it seems like a good development for them long term.
- 15155 2y ago> They’re still able to access compute now, albeit at a higher cost. Perfect is the enemy of good. If massive resources must be diverted from R&D and into evading sanctions, it's harder to catch up as quickly or cheaply. Meanwhile: TSMC and the collective West are also making significant strides.
- surfpel 2y agoLarge market demand for a product is in itself a driver for R&D investment. With CCP level strategic investment it's a non-issue. They also have some of the best models out there already, so if they are being slowed down on AI development, it's clearly insignificant.
- indulona 2y ago[flagged]
- mrweasel 2y ago> Research firm TechInsights recently discovered that Huawei’s latest AI servers contained processors made by TSMC, Nvidia Corp.’s most important manufacturing partner. So they cut off Nvidia? Or do Nvidias customer order chips directly from TSMC and it's one of those clients? It would be funnier if it was Nvidia, but probably not.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]