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Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

nytimes.com

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Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#141

Post by BrannonB »

allegedganon wrote: post #124
tzahola wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you EE guys would finally got off your high horses and dropped Verilog in favor of JavaScript, we wouldn’t have this kind of problem!!!

Funny, and beneath the joke lies a nice nugget of truth: the landscape of hardware design languages is a truly sad thing to behold and deeply hinders innovation in the space. There are numerous attempts at fixing the problem, but all of them ring hollow as the big ASIC design shops basically are all relying on ancient languages. Another thing that IMO has dealt a grave blow to the whole scene is a cultural one: peopl…

If you think Verilog is bad, you should see the languages used by heart surgeons, civil engineers and rocket scientists. The language of human biology is ridiculously verbose without even a hint of polymorphism. ;-)

My point is that it's a little silly to evaluate hardware engineering through the lense of software engineering.

In hardware engineering the part that looks like "software" (what a HW engineer may refer to as the behavioral RTL) is a small component of the total design effort. The tradeoffs are all completely different.

Computer hardware engineering is much closer to designing a bridge than it is to writing a software application. Debating the best hardware-descriptor language is similar to debating whether bridge designers should use No. 1 or No. 2 pencils.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#142

Post by blattimwind »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #129
tormeh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NK-33 engines from 1960s and 70s Soviet Union were used by American space companies as late as 2014. These were just stuck and forgotten in a Russian warehouse. Doubtlessly other Soviet technology has also been lost and awaits rediscovery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

Not sure if that's a testament to innovation, or to the American tendency to throw things away. American engines of the same vintage probably would have been used if they were available for a similar price.

It's not just about the price; these engines are still highly competitive fifty years after they were designed. That's quite a feat. They're also based around unique technology.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#143

Post by blattimwind »

RamshackleJ wrote: post #12
krapht wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People write this glibly without understanding history. Soviet Russia made great leaps in science and technology where it was a national priority. You can have academic freedom in most scientific disciplines without the political freedom to criticize the government.

TLDR; But the soviets lost. I'm not an expert in soviet history but I feel like their efforts around science and technology were economically unsustainable and almost all of them were directly or tangentially related to the military. I don't remember the soviets exporting consumer goods to the west. Academic freedom isn't the only freedom that scientists and engineers care about. I don't doubt that china can spend a…

> I don't remember the soviets exporting consumer goods to the west.

The GDR did.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#144

Post by a1369209993 »

tzahola wrote: post #103
andygrovetheman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a mostly-unrelated note: Apparently big difference between the US and Germany in the nuclear race was not science but instead engineering. Fermi and Oppenheimer were useful to the US effort but Heisenberg probably had the intellectual firepower to do that for Germany. The REAL advances the US made were in chemical and metallurgical engineering at an industrial scale. Dealing with gaseous and liquid uranium and plu…

Maybe if Germans had not wasted their engineering efforts on idiotic “superweapons” like the Schwerer Gustav [0] or the 130m long V-3 cannon [1], they could have succeeded with their nuclear program. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon

There's something hilariously ironic about that, given the next couple of decades.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#145

Post by rasz »

wishart_washy wrote: post #44

Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…

Reminded me of comment under recent Cornell dormrooms clip uploaded by Bruce Land (ece.cornell.edu) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qthb6taW_9U

"Just dropped in by accident. I see 80% of them are asian girls, is this recording from Shenzhen?"

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#146

Post by krupan »

BrannonB wrote: post #141
allegedganon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, and beneath the joke lies a nice nugget of truth: the landscape of hardware design languages is a truly sad thing to behold and deeply hinders innovation in the space. There are numerous attempts at fixing the problem, but all of them ring hollow as the big ASIC design shops basically are all relying on ancient languages. Another thing that IMO has dealt a grave blow to the whole scene is a cultural one: peopl…

If you think Verilog is bad, you should see the languages used by heart surgeons, civil engineers and rocket scientists. The language of human biology is ridiculously verbose without even a hint of polymorphism. ;-) My point is that it's a little silly to evaluate hardware engineering through the lense of software engineering. In hardware engineering the part that looks like "software" (what a HW engineer may refer t…

Sorry, but that comment makes it sound like you've either never used pencils, or you have never used verilog.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#148

Post by adventured »

hospes wrote: post #105
darkmighty wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I'm not so sure if much would change (w.r.t. performance) if they switched to a more democratic regime. In the end I were always a bit scared/reluctant about the US often touted ultimate justification for democratic capitalism that it is simply more efficient -- "Cultivate freedom -- after all, in the end it's just more efficient!". What if... it isn't? China is turning the tables on this argument quite a bi…

>> It's still unclear whether China will be able to achieve technological parity, but it's quite probable it will overtake the US as the foremost economy this century. China is already #1 by GDP (PPP) with ~$23 trillions [1]. US is #2 with ~$19 trillions (numbers are from 2017). So here China already overtook US. If you look at nominal GDP, then US is #1 with ~20 trillions and China is #2 with ~14 trillions [2]. With…

> With the government and political system that US currently has it will take very short amount of time for China to close this gap as well.

That's a pretty amusing claim given China is a wildly regressive Communist dictatorship and the world's most indebted nation (before they even get well-off at the median, which bodes very badly for their future). Not to mention that the people of China have few rights at all at this point, the little progress they had made has been revoked by dictator Xi. That extreme repression is going to get worse with time, dictatorships only tend to get more violent and repressive (as witnessed by Xi's million person Muslim concentration camps, one would have to assume that's just the beginning of his reign of terror). Ultimately it will break China if they don't topple the dictatorship. The system that Deng Xiaoping created that made the Chinese expansion possible, will not function under a Mao-like zero rights gulag system.

> China's school education system is better, they have number of pretty good universities, state supports STEM.

The US university system is vastly superior. The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20. China has nothing like: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Duke, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, CIT, Hopkins, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, et al. China can't even match the second tier US schools. It'll take them generations to catch up in a best case scenario.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#149

Post by scruple »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #121
scruple wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current US government approach to immigrants, legal or otherwise, would seem designed to convince immigrants to go elsewhere. I'm curious where you live and wether or not you can actually, personally, witness the effects of legal immigration there. In SoCal, where I've spent the last decade+, what you're saying rings completely hollow, to me. I have seen literal tour buses of mainland Chinese folks touring new…

Are they touring those developments in order to find a place to live? Or are they investors who will stay in China?

As far as I've seen from the last 2 years of living in this neighborhood, they're moving in and staying here. At least enough time out of the year that you don't notice if they're gone for prolonged periods of time (and it would be hard not to notice, the neighborhood is blanketed by solicitors and their ridiculous flyers). A few homes are known to be empty, but only a few, and this development has > 2k homes in it. There are a couple of rentals, but from what the neighbors and I have gathered there really are only a few. It's Irvine, CA, so it's just sort of like this, I gather.

edit/ Having said that, it's not very different from what you'd see in the San Gabriel valley in recent years, either. If they're living here full-time, or not, is any ones guess. I suppose I could find out if I really wanted to, but it'd probably take weeks.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#150

Post by stale2002 »

RamshackleJ wrote: post #5
fermienrico wrote: post #2

Having worked in China in the semiconductor industry, it really saddens me what the Chinese are trying to do. You simply cannot out innovate 4 decades of work in a few years no matter how much money you throw at it. Also, China has a branding problem and it is only going to get worse. They can make short term progress but it takes a long time to build a great brand.

Stealing IP mostly helps manufacturing, It doesn't really help innovation. If they want to build up their semiconductor industry they need to steal the people who are creating IP, which is kinda the opposite of what is happening. the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule.

There is another word for "stealing IP" that has worked quite well in the software industry.

It's called open source.

Yes, most startups aren't releasing all their code or anything, but there is a huge culture of open source development tools and software.

I think this open source culture, where lots of stuff is available easily and for free, is a big reason why the software industry has been so successful, and why places like SF have been so successful. (IE, SF job hopping, and "stealing"/poaching engineering talent, so that knowledge transfers).

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