61–70 of 127 posts
I'm surprised nothing has been said about Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin ARM chips. Their latest mobile chips are definitely on par with the best on the market. Mediatek is also another big player among the chip manufacturer and they make their own-designed chips as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but I also believe that the Western policy of hoping that welcoming in China would lead to greater democratic freedoms was one of arrogance. I'd probably go with 'naivety' or 'over-optimism' rather than arrogance.
I guess it depends on whether one thinks that democracy and freedom are good things as such. They are not necessarily universal values, even if many in the West tend to think so.
I'm surprised nothing has been said about Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin ARM chips. Their latest mobile chips are definitely on par with the best on the market. Mediatek is also another big player among the chip manufacturer and they make their own-designed chips as well.
> In return, the company — once a symbol of China’s progress and engineering know-how — will be allowed to buy the American-made microchips, software and other tools it needs to survive. Aren't most mobile device SoC/ASICs made by non-US companies like TSMC and Samsung?
The fabrication of SoCs for mobile is mostly at TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in Korea, but the ownership of the chips is American. TSMC manufactures the die, but it's fair to say that Qualcomm is the one "making" it since they own the IP and do the front and back end design-work. Similarly, you can say Apple makes the iPhone, even though final assembly is done at Foxconn or Wistron.
I am so used to hearing what is basically propaganda in our press about how much better we are than the rest of the world, that now articles like this inspire scepticism.
Our country (USA) does indeed have a lot of advantages with: technology and geographic isolation.
But we also have problems in income inequality and increasing corruption in our political system (Clintons, Trump, etc., etc.)
I really like the ‘Sputnik’ analogy because just as my country had an ‘oh shit’ moment when we realized we were behind, I expect the Chinese to go through the expensive and long process of owning the entire stack, micro chips, and up.
I think history will suggest that the end of Deng Xiaoping's long-term strategy of "hide our capacities and bide our time" around 2015 was too premature to meet the government of China's long-term goals. The moderate amount of international goodwill that existed seems to have completely evaporated and been replaced with significant amounts of suspicion following the events of the past few years in the region. Because…
Idk I think US has bigger problems than whether it's semiconductor tech gets stolen. Social media and the news media have created such a dysfunctional environment that I am finding it increasingly hard to believe constructive debate/solutions on anything are possible until the underlying environment producing the dysfunction is cleaned up. If not we are just going to get more and more leaders from both sides propped…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fabrication of SoCs for mobile is mostly at TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in Korea, but the ownership of the chips is American. TSMC manufactures the die, but it's fair to say that Qualcomm is the one "making" it since they own the IP and do the front and back end design-work. Similarly, you can say Apple makes the iPhone, even though final assembly is done at Foxconn or Wistron.
Complete tangent, but in case someone else gets a chuckle out of it: the word "fabrication" means "creation"... but also serves as a synonym for "falsehood", almost an antonym in some contexts. I'm not aware of many words in English that can mean both a thing and its opposite. "Cleave" means to bind together, or to completely separate... Any language geeks out there know of others? Or what such words are called?
China has an official plan, "Made in China 2025".[1] It's about moving up the value chain. Key areas are semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and aircraft engines. China is still way behind in wafer fabs, but SIMC is coming along. Wikipedia says they're at 40nm, which is not close to the state of the art, but is good enough for much consumer electronics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
They're at 28nm and building 8 core x86 chips that don't look terrible. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/microarchitectures/wuda...
So I think we are lefting out the chance for a breakthrough. I imagine China could do their own Manhattan project for semiconductors and catch up faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fabrication of SoCs for mobile is mostly at TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in Korea, but the ownership of the chips is American. TSMC manufactures the die, but it's fair to say that Qualcomm is the one "making" it since they own the IP and do the front and back end design-work. Similarly, you can say Apple makes the iPhone, even though final assembly is done at Foxconn or Wistron.
Complete tangent, but in case someone else gets a chuckle out of it: the word "fabrication" means "creation"... but also serves as a synonym for "falsehood", almost an antonym in some contexts. I'm not aware of many words in English that can mean both a thing and its opposite. "Cleave" means to bind together, or to completely separate... Any language geeks out there know of others? Or what such words are called?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but I also believe that the Western policy of hoping that welcoming in China would lead to greater democratic freedoms was one of arrogance. I'd probably go with 'naivety' or 'over-optimism' rather than arrogance.
I guess it depends on whether one thinks that democracy and freedom are good things as such. They are not necessarily universal values, even if many in the West tend to think so.
Looking at China's past decade or so... I'm getting the sense that they're going to be on the usual authoritarian trajectory of countries that decide the democracy isn't for them. Initially it can work better, because democracies are always messy, especially superficially messy in the ways that elites find oh-so-distasteful. But the thing is, while democracies are always about the same level of messy, the authoritarian regimes build up a lot of stress in the system which they hide in various places until they can hide no more, and one day the whole thing simultaneously explodes and implodes and is, on the whole, a great deal more messy than the ever-so-distasteful democracy would have been. Is the messiness of democracy the fault of the governance mechanism, or a reflection of the underlying messiness that exists regardless?
Is democracy good as such? That's a question for personal values. Would democracy be better for China in the next, say, 20 years than its current path? Probably, by any metric you choose. For all of its disadvantages on a day-to-day basis, in a 21st century world democracy really does have some significant long-term advantages, regardless of your local ideology, as long as you like, say, being alive, not fighting civil wars, that sort of thing.