Qualcomm being the only company allowed to sell 4G SOCs to Huawei was a bullshit move in the first place.
The only reason Qualcomm sold so many to Huawei was because the US blocked Mediatek and UNISOC. The US government never gave a legitimate reason why they never granted permission to the competition that applied to supply Huawei.
28nm is the nominal resolution of the scanner. The chips that can be made with a single exposure. In that measure no ASML DUV scanner is 7nm either. The physics of 193nm light makes it impossible for any DUV scanner to have a nominal resolution of 7nm. 7nm chips are made using DUV by exposing 4 times at a 28nm resolution. The same quad patterning techniques allows 22nm chips to be made with a 90nm machine.
The name is also misleading 7nm chips aren’t sub 9nm. TSMC’s 7nm chips are physically 10nm. The marketing names haven’t matched for years. It all started when TSMC sold 20nm FinFET under 16nm branding as they believed the addition of FinFET gave it 16nm performance. Then the entire industry adjusted their naming conventions to match with TSMC.
SMIC, Huawei didn’t get to where they are by compromising. They never would’ve bought the Chinese domestic alternatives if not for sanctions. Price doesn’t matter in this industry, what they’re looking for is the best in the market. This is not the type of capital equipment that subsidies can sell. Which is why when US scanner manufacturers couldn’t compete with ASML, they completely failed as economically viable businesses and their assets were sold off.
China prepared for this 17 years ago. They launched the “02 Special Project” all the way back in 2006. The companies established by those grants have existed years before the sanctions. They were able to develop the products but selling them was another thing entirely, until the sanctions hit causing a massive boom in their revenue. People forget that it was market conditions that killed GlobalFoundries 7nm effort not technical issues. The same reason UMC gave up on anything more advanced than 14nm. Sanctions created the inevitability of Chinese 7nm by wedding the world’s largest telecom equipment vendor, Huawei to SMIC.
It’s an amusing coincidence that by the time ASML will no longer be granted export licenses for their 5nm capable DUV scanners, the NXT:2000i and above, SMEE will be selling a 7nm capable scanner, the SSA/800-10W. A machine easily comparable to the NXT:1980Di that TSMC used to develop their N7 process. The fact that the NXT:1980Di and anything less advanced than it isn’t going to be export restricted is an implicit acknowledgement of the Chinese capability of making competing machines.
5nm capable DUV scanners, such as the SSA/900 still in development, might be a requirement for SMIC N+2 however as the “7nm” Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the TSMC N5 made Kirin 9000. That suggest a density far exceeding anything any other foundry has been capable of with just DUV, such as Intel 7 or TSMC N7/N7P.
Applied Materials and LAM are less of an issue. AMEC has been selling 5nm etching systems to Samsung and TSMC for years.
TSMC made Kirin 9000 ran out in 2021, P50 Pro was the last phone to use it and the Kirin 820 ran out in 2022. It’s only the 5G base stations that still use TSMC made HiSilicon chips.
The US government placed Huawei into the US’s so called “entity list”. Qualcomm needs US government authorization to sell to Huawei and they’re limited to selling 4G SOCs.
The P60 having the SD 8+G1 might be lag from Qualcomm having to make a 4G variant or lag from Huawei transitioning from Kirin to SD SOCs. Alternatively it could just be that the SD 8G2 is not worth the price Qualcomm is selling it at given that Poco doesn’t bother to use it for their best phone, the F5 Pro.
There are no trade restrictions to selling to other Chinese smartphone brands. Qualcomm would collapse if it weren’t allowed to sell to them. BBK, Transsion, and Xiaomi buy up most of Qualcomm’s phone chips and make most of the world’s phones. Samsung uses its own Exynos for the A series phones that make up the bulk of its sales.
A SMIC “7nm” Cortex-A510 core is more efficient than a Samsung 4nm LPE Cortex-A510 core although TSMC 4nm remains incomparable.
The Kirin 9000S is about the same size as the original Kirin 9000 chip, which was made using TSMC 5nm. That implies a transistor density that is closer to 5nm than it is to 7nm.
It is competitive with 5nm chips. Performance and efficiency are equivalent to the SD 888, and better than the Exynos 2100. The Kirin 9000S has custom Taishan cores with SMT allowing it to achieve a better multi-core score than all but the SD 8G2. Still the Kirin 9000S doesn’t quite match the power efficiency of the original 9000 and the custom Maleoon 910 GPU doesn’t have the raw performance of the original’s Mali G78 MP24.
All evidence points to SMIC “7nm” being comparable to Samsung 5nm LPE in density, performance and efficiency.
Even with just auto translated subtitles, the Geekerwan video was incredibly informative unlike the…
Trash article by Bloomberg as always absolutely bereft of any of the technical details that might have made the TechInsights report actually interesting. Instead they decide it’s better to waste the reader’s time by shoving in the useless opinions of stock hawkers, business school “analysts”, and people who are paid to brainlessly toe the state department line. Nobody left with a relevant computer engineering background in the west apparently. What a bait-and-switch, I regret bothering to read it. I can’t stand the slimy way US mainstream media tries to manipulate sentiment.
Although I’d say these channels are more accurately described as apolitical analysis based on facts.
The only Nintendo console I ever had was a Famiclone so I don’t really have much nostalgia for their games.
It’s just Nintendo ROMs that are disappearing. It’s still easier than ever to find even the most obscure classic PC games on abandonware sites and GOG compilation torrents. It’s also only the SEO abusing ROM sites that are vulnerable to Nintendo’s attacks. Complete ROMsets for their consoles can still be obtained through torrents, Vimm.net, and the r/ROMs megathread especially for the older cartridge consoles.
Emulating a current gen Nintendo console has never been as good as it is for Switch emulators. Any new PC can emulate Switch Triple As at full speed. Android is getting builds of the Yuzu emulator and mobile SOCs have enough power to run less demanding titles. When a lot people who don’t even own a Switch can play Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo is understandably trying to crack down. The portable aspect of the Switch is no longer a unique advantage. It used to be just GPD making those handheld PCs now every brand is trying to compete in that form factor.
Honestly I think the state of emulation in general is experiencing a golden age.
Retroid, Anbernic and AYN are making hardware that is a better solution for most people than trying to jailbreak and refurbish old original portable consoles. The screens, the analogs and the buttons they use are as good if not better than the first party hardware. Unlike bulky handheld PC, their Linux or Android based emulation handhelds are still in the same size and weight class as the PSP.
A couple years ago the Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators were basically just experimental demos. They weren’t stable enough to actually finish any game on and most CPUs weren’t fast enough to run them at full speed. They’re still hit and miss but the list of playable titles will only ever grow.
It has come to the point that the PC can play everything. All previous gen consoles aside from the OG Xbox have emulators at a playable state. There are almost no current gen console exclusives anymore as the PC is getting ports of PS4/PS5 exclusives, the XBone/Series never had any to begin with, and of coarse the aforementioned Switch emulation.
Being given access to accurate intel is no guarantee that they actually leverage it to form their own views.
There are anecdotes of US officials using mainstream media to spoonfeed them their positions on issues as they can’t be assed to do anything resembling actual work.
US mainstream media isn’t even trustworthy for predicting the US economy.
They downplayed if not outright denied the potential causes of the Great Recession until well after it had already occurred. They then portrayed the Great Recession “from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business” manipulating the empathy of their audience in order to serve the interests of their true masters.
It’s conventional warfare, not guerilla warfare, nor a suicide bombing campaign. The worst case scenario would resemble the Iran-Iraq war and the initial conditions resembled Northern Cyprus more than Afghanistan.
The Ukrainians don’t really even have an equivalent to the Viet Cong. Insurgencies need the support of the local populace to eat and operate without being ratted out. Only Kherson is even close to divided enough for that to have a remote chance of occurring.
The terrain and culture of Ukraine aren’t like Afghanistan. Afghans are more loyal to their tribes than Kabul. The underdeveloped subsistence farming economy of Afghanistan means any insurgent knows how to live off the land and survive living in deprivation for long and sustained periods. The terrain of Afghanistan allows insurgents to easily isolate whatever forces the government sends in an attempt to control the countryside. The Taliban won without any state really backing them. The overall population of Ukraine and Afghanistan might be similar but what matters most is the demographic in the age range for military service.
Syria didn’t turn into an Afghanistan. The Donbass republics fended for themselves for 8 years while the DRA only lasted 3 years alone. Even then the DRA still outlasted the Soviet Union so had material support continued they might’ve continued on as a rump state. It wasn’t like the US puppet, Ghani’s regime, which just collapsed immediately after the US pullout.
Ukrainians are more Northern Alliance than Taliban. Their ideology isn’t anywhere near as unified as the Taliban’s. The moderate liberals and extremist fascists would turn on each other if living conditions deteriorated sharply.
There can be no defeat either. Pulling out would be political suicide for anyone in the Kremlin. Abandoning Russians in Russian territory would be different from abandoning the DRA. Nukes would fall before Crimea falls.
Anyway, you can’t really predict the future by looking at the past. The similarities are only down to hindsight and brute force exhaustion of every possible historical parallel.
If the Russians were even half as petty and image obsessed as the Ukrainians are, they’d fire a missile into that trident.
That’s based on TSMC’s own test chip not an actual customer’s. 17.92 mm² is incredibly tiny when SoCs, CPUs and GPUs range in size from 100 to 600 mm² increasing the proportion of chips with defects as the number of chips on the wafer drops.
From that very article
In that case, let us take the 100 mm2 die as an example of the first mobile processors coming out of TSMC’s process. Again, taking the die as square, a defect rate of 1.271 per cm2 would afford a yield of 32.0%.
As TSMC themselves designed the chip, they definitely followed all their design rules for that process to maximize yield. No customer would do that.
Anand explains this in one of his articles.
But have no fear. What normally happens is your foundry company will come to you with a list of design rules and hints. If you follow all of the guidelines, the foundry will guarantee that they can produce your chip and that it will work. In other words, do what we tell you to do, and your chip will yield.
The problem is that if you follow every last one of these design rules and hints your chip won’t be any faster than it was on the older manufacturing process. Your yield will be about the same but your cost will be higher since you’ll bloat your design taking into account these “hints”.
Generally between process nodes the size of the wafer doesn’t change. We were at 200mm wafers for a while and now modern fabs use 300mm wafers. The transistor size does shrink however, so in theory you could fit more die on a wafer with each process shrink.
The problem is with any new process, the cost per wafer goes up. It’s a new process, most likely more complex, and thus the wafer cost is higher. If the wafer costs are 50% higher, then you need to fit at least 50% more die on each wafer in order to break even with your costs on the old process. In reality you actually need to fit more than 50% die per wafer on the new process because yields usually suck at the start. But if you follow the foundry’s guidelines to guarantee yield, you won’t even be close to breaking even.
The end result is you get zero benefit from moving to the new process. That’s not an option for anyone looking to actually use Moore’s Law to their advantage. Definitely not for a GPU company.
The solution is to have some very smart people in your company that can take these design rules and hints the foundry provides, and figure out which ones can be ignored, and ways to work around the others. This is an area where ATI and NVIDIA differ greatly.
TSMC N7, N7P and Intel 7 don’t use EUV. It’s all quad patterned DUV. DUV lithography has been in use since the 1990s going from 800nm to N7P.
Every single node after TSMC’s so called 16nm has been all marketing. It would’ve more accurate to call TSMC 16FF as 20nm FinFET. This is why Intel brands what they themselves called 10nm as Intel 7 to bring their marketing more in line with TSMC’s.
SMIC N+1 has a density of 89 million of transistors per mm² while TSMC N7 has 91.2. TSMC 10FF and Samsung 10LPP only offer slightly more than half that density.
NASA planing to use SpaceX’s Starship as the Human Landing System, has convinced me that China will step foot on the moon before Artemis III.
I kind of wonder, if “Buy America” wasn’t a requirement and the US allowed China to bid for High Speed Rail contracts would the US already have decent HSR network by now?
Oh well, at least the hype is distracting the US from attacking the more productive sectors China’s economy. US government officials really seem fixated on whatever the current tech buzzword is.
Honestly, the self-driving car hype train from a decade ago made me a bit skeptical about the newest AI wave. In spite of the absolutely massive gains Nvidia’s machine learning chips have made, Full Self-Driving is perpetually coming next year according to Tesla.
Before sanctions, Huawei was the world’s largest telecom equipment vendor.
After sanctions, Huawei is still the largest except they barely have any US chips in their products.
The CHIPS act has always been incredibly questionable. It seemingly goes against market forces. The US are alienating what were potentially the largest customers for all the chips they plan on making. Customers are especially scarce at the higher end processes that the US are targeting.
Global Foundries abandoned 7nm since they believed that most of their clients wouldn’t be able to afford migrating to leading edge nodes. UMC barely had any clients for their 14nm process. Not even Global Foundries’ contractual obligations to AMD / IBM, UMC’s connection to Mediatek, and access to the latest ASML EUV machines were enough incentive for them to transition to 7nm and beyond.
The US essentially made Huawei a guaranteed customer to SMIC. EUV isn’t even necessary for 7nm and 7nm isn’t necessary for 5G. Intel 7 and TSMC N7, N7P are made with DUV. TSMC’s 12nm was used for UNISOC’s Makalu 5G modem and one of their 5G SOCs. The delay in making 5G phones might just be Huawei needing EDA tools to design a modem using SMIC’s existing processes.
The way the sanctions are so gradual it’s almost as if the US wants China’s chip sector to undergo import substitution industrialization. It really resembles the slow ramp up of import restrictions that established the automobile industry in many countries. It’s also kind of amusing that in practice it’s the US that are cutting themselves off from advanced tech while China can still by the latest chips. Nvidia made the A800, and H800 just for China… Nvidia probably lobbied to make the restriction easy to implement and based on the specification that affects performance the least.
US bans Huawei so there stuck with 4.5G marketed at 5G.
US bans DJI drones in government so they use terrible Skydio drones for search and rescue.
I’m still undecided if the hype for the 5G AI driven “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is warranted though.
It’s written by David P. Goldman, an Asia Times writer whose views run counter to the mainstream US media China narrative.
The National Interest putting one of his pieces on the front page seems really uncharacteristic of them.
Sanctions really are the biggest own goal.
It would be the LEAP not the PD-14 in the MC-21, if not for sanctions. In normal conditions, it’s a winner takes all market no matter how tiny the difference is every cent counts to carriers. Only the single most efficient engine available would’ve made sense and it turns out sanctions did just that.
The sanctions are the largest boon to Chinese semi tool companies; they were snubbed by big name Chinese tech beforehand. Now, fear and uncertainty of supply weighs down the western competition. ASML in China has been brought down to SMEE’s level; next year, ASML can’t sell anything more advanced than what SMEE can make.
SMIC would have the same issues as Global Foundries did with justifying the investment in 7nm. The few fabless companies in China that use leading edge processes are wedded to TSMC. If Huawei wasn’t there as a guaranteed customer, SMIC wouldn’t have been able to get their investment to pay off. Huawei didn’t even consider domestic alternatives outside of what they themselves make before the sanctions. The Mi 10 Ultra, with a QCOM SoC, had more domestic parts than the Huawei equivalent.
Even advanced engines can’t redeem the F-35 though, it’s still slower than the JF-17.