Feels like we have news like that every quarter but not a lot of actual change. Does any foundry outside of China, e.g. TSMC, buying or even getting any partnership to test them? Without subsidies? What’s the yield relative to alternatives?
It does beg for a DeepSeek moment for hardware, namely actual competition stemmed from necessity, but again so far that race has been a lot of claims.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/china-leading-us-in-technology-race-in-all-but-a-few-fields-thinktank-finds What do you think the logical outcome is? China has made phenomenal progress and all the bans and geopolitically motivated sabotage have only accelerated it.
They have plenty results in this field not ‘claims’. I don’t see how you can be dismissive of this.I let you read the comments from their source since you didn’t actually bother reading mine.
Edit: people can check my Lemmy history on the topic, I ask the same thing here every few months. Anyway also the moment to suggest Chips War (even though, as always, outdated) as a good book IMHO on the geopolitics of chips manufacturing.
1 you didn’t provide any sources. 2 your book suggestion leads me to repeat my comment: ‘geopolitically motivated’.
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology is a 2022 nonfiction book by Chris Miller, an economic historian and nonresident senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.
(With mass murderer Dick Cheney on the board of directors)
I have a slight feeling he may not be totally objective.
It’s weird to claim there’s no actual change when the change is very visible. China is now making their own chips domestically that are only a generation or two behind the bleeding edge. Also, why does it matter whether they’re subsidizing chip production or not?
The visible progress that you’re asking for will happen when all the pieces of the puzzle come together. China has to develop performant RISCV based chip designs that’s what XiangShan project is doing. They also need to physically build the EUV machines, which is what this article is talking about. Then they will start pumping out chips that are competitive with bleeding edge TSMC chips.
You can look at how other industries like rail, electric vehicles, clean energy, and so on developed in China previously. It’s always the same pattern where there’s a few years of build up, and then there’s an explosion of this tech on a scale nobody has seen before.
China is now making their own chips domestically that are only a generation or two behind the bleeding edge.
Maybe I’m missing something here, which chips are you talking about? Are you talking about something other than Kirin 9000S and if so which ones please?
There’s a whole range of 9000S, 9020, and 9100 of chips now, with 9100 being 6nm. It’s clear and steady progress on display here. Meanwhile, there’s really nowhere to go past 1nm chips using silicon substrate. So, it’s not like western foundries have no path forward now.
There are two paths towards improving performance going forward. First is to start using new substrates the way China is doing with carbon nanotube based chips. This requires phenomenal level of investment that can only really be done at state level. Another path is to improve chip designs the way Apple did with M series. And these aren’t mutually exclusive obviously as better chip designs will benefit from faster substrates as well.
with 9100 being 6nm
For historical context TSMC announced 7nm in 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process and 5nm in 2020, so 5 years ago.
That’s not that long to build out this kind of infrastructure basically from scratch.
