Well, except one country every other is using it?
One country with 1400 million people
China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
71–80 of 118 posts
Re: China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a hilarious directive since their homegrown CPU is 900 MHz. They are on something like a 30nm die. There is just no way they can transition to those chips in modern devices. This sounds like exactly the sort of order that would come from Xi. He’s living in his information bubble and is excited to go to war.
No, they are not that far behind. You're thinking of Longsoon I guess, but they have a 7nm process at SMIC and Hisilicon designing ARM-based server processors on it[1]. Sure, ARM is western, but guess what, they have the IP anyway, as they required ARM to do business through a subsidiary in China. China is serious about semiconductors. Hisilicon is competitive in many markets. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-comp…
It's also a "so what" situation. If China's economy is severed from the rest of the world's, competitors can't take its market share. Being five or even ten years behind on chips is irrelevant when your consumers can't go elsewhere. What did people use their smartphones for ten years ago? Recording themselves and watching cat videos. What do they do now? You don't need 2nm chips to do anything except take market share from the company using 3nm chips. The F-22 Raptor uses an i960 processor from 1988.
Re: China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
#73Artificially restricting yourself to inferior silicon is a great way to boost your economy. /s
RockChip's ARM SoC's are quite fast actually. I run a couple of OrangePi 5Bs which work quite nicely. Mind you these are 4+4 bigLITTLE systems with 35 degrees C idle without any tuning and passive cooling. Huawei is also quite improved on hardware reliability and design department in the last years, so there's no need for concern for them. They still need a Infiniband equivalent network layer for HPC, though.
Their media capabilities are quite meh however
Re: China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed though the availability of both would keep prices low by virtue of competition
They won't, for the same reason the USSR didn't. The people making these chinese goods are part of the government. They're also part of a government that will literally kill them if they're not the best at everything, and of course they will fuck up some bits. So they will outlaw access to foreign technology, to hide how they're "embarassing the Chinese state". Because totalitarian ideologies ... they can't fix reali…
Spoken like someone with no clue about China apart from social media. Talk to any Chinese entrepreneur and you'll know the competition is much more strong and ruthless than in West. Even for capital intensive high tech industries like EV and mobile you'll find more companies than rest of world put together.
Re: China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
#75Artificially restricting yourself to inferior silicon is a great way to boost your economy. /s
You're mistaken. Huawei's Kirin Silicon was ahead of what the likes of Qualcomm offered, right before they were banned from TSMC by the US. It was a damn shame too, right when Qualcomm was getting some needed competition, the US ban happened. Convenient for Qualcomm but a huge blow to consumers.
Kirin wasn't ahead, they were "just" head to head with Qualcomm. But that's not very hard if you use generic ARM design and can pay for the BEST TSMC node.
Producing good/great ARM SoCs is simply a function of producing in TSMC. The reason why Google abd Samsung SoCs are mediocre is that they produce them in Samsung fabs.
Re: China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
#76Seems like a signal that they see the trade consequences of invading Taiwan, and they're going to put things in motion such that they'll be prepared to be able to handle them.
There's no way they invade Taiwan in a controlled manner, it's too easy to sink a navy over that distance. Sure they could do a long range bombardment but then there's nothing left to take.
Sure they could do a long range bombardment but then there's nothing left to take.
This is irrelevant. Not because you're wrong, but because you're thinking of terms of what a rational, reasonable person would do. Taking Taiwan has about as much to do with helping China as the Iraq War had to do with avenging 9/11: nothing whatsoever. If China attacks Taiwan it will be for the sole reason that Xi Jinping has and is using it as a political tool to amass power. For that purpose it doesn't matter if Taiwan is a smoking crater by the end.
Re: China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're mistaken. Huawei's Kirin Silicon was ahead of what the likes of Qualcomm offered, right before they were banned from TSMC by the US. It was a damn shame too, right when Qualcomm was getting some needed competition, the US ban happened. Convenient for Qualcomm but a huge blow to consumers.
Kirin wasn't ahead, they were "just" head to head with Qualcomm. But that's not very hard if you use generic ARM design and can pay for the BEST TSMC node. Producing good/great ARM SoCs is simply a function of producing in TSMC. The reason why Google abd Samsung SoCs are mediocre is that they produce them in Samsung fabs.
You're also mistaken. Qualcomm rarely used "generic" cores. Just like Apple, they had their own custom designs(Kryo) based on the generic specs(Cortex), which were instruction compatible but more efficient, that being one of the reason why they were ahead of the competition using generic ARM cores on TSMC, like MediaTek.
Re: China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
#78What use are chip factories in the United States when you cannot sell them to the largest market of chips that only will become even more larger as Chinese middle class and their consumption grows?
Making money is not the primary object. Currently chips for civilian and military applications often come out of Taiwan. The strategic and political situation of Taiwan is -fluid. Losing these fabs would be a heavy blow to the west both economically and more importantly qua military defense. Thus extra fabs in other (western) countries are pro-indicated for this reason alone. It's insurance.
Losing Taiwan fabs would have only minimal military impact. Military hardware uses older computing tech, built on larger nodes (its development takes many years / decades). It's also relatively low volume and military can outbid almost any other customer.
I believe the importance of Taiwanese fabs is very overstated. Taiwan is mainly a (geo) political matter.
Re: China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD
#79Seems like a signal that they see the trade consequences of invading Taiwan, and they're going to put things in motion such that they'll be prepared to be able to handle them.
That’s a hilarious directive since their homegrown CPU is 900 MHz. They are on something like a 30nm die. There is just no way they can transition to those chips in modern devices. This sounds like exactly the sort of order that would come from Xi. He’s living in his information bubble and is excited to go to war.
Nope. Loongson is building on 14/12nm nodes and competing on performance with first-gen Ryzen and Coffee Lake. Zhaoxin is still on 16nm AFAIK, but they're matching modern architectures on IPC. CXMT is making LPDDR5 dies in meaningful quantities. Underestimate Chinese industry at your peril, particularly when they've got a blank cheque from the Party.