Huawei and SMIC quietly rolled out a new Kirin 9000C processor.
Huawei and SMIC quietly rolled out a new Kirin 9000C processor.
Chinese foundry SMIC may have broken the 5nm process barrier, as evidenced by a new Huawei laptop listed with an advanced chip with 5nm manufacturing tech — a feat previously thought impossible due to U.S sanctions.
...Do you guys think this sudden Chinese ability to manufacture technology might have something to do with the entire Western World spending three or four decades outsourcing the manufacturing of every single kind of technology to China specifically because it was cheap? No, no, I realize that I sound crazy when I say that.
And the manufacturing can’t be brought back home, because the domestic costs of production have skyrocketed thanks to the financialization of everything in the interim period.
Also because manufacturing takes a lot of skill, and so much of it has been outsourced for so long that the Western world simply lacks the infrastructure to be able to do it. And infrastructure in this case doesn't just mean equipment. Equipment could be procured quickly. It a also means a population with the relevant education for and, above all, experience with working in large scale manufacturing of complicated products.
Once upon a time "Made in China" really did mean that something was of dubious quality. Back when they started putting all the manufacturing in China simply because it was cheap and China was still getting to grips with how to do this large scale manufacturing with no experience and a severe lack of people educated in how it worked. Two or three generations later and that is no longer the case. Unsurprisingly, people raised and educated from birth in the world's largest manufacturer of goods are kind of good at making stuff. But moving production back would mean more than just building factories and machines. It would mean accepting that two or so decades long period where you are just learning how to make stuff in the 21st century.
This stuff always reminds me of China's nuclear program in the 60s. Like once the Sino-Soviet Split happened the US literally just assumed that Chinese people were too stupid to produce an atomic bomb. Even after China's first nuclear test in '64 the US would not recognize them as a nuclear power, and kept insisting they would be unable to develop nuclear armed ballistic missiles or thermonuclear weapons, both of which were then tested in the next two years and both times it was deeply shocking to the US foreign policy blob.
Also, the US went on to learning nothing from this becuase the exact same thing happened with North Korea which went from their first nuclear test to thermonuclear weapons in 10 years. Like in the early stages North Korea was very willing to surrender their nuclear weapons program for lifting of sanctions, but the US would never negotiate in good faith becuase they genuinely believed the North Koreans were to primitive to proceed to the next stage of development.
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies..... However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy
I just read an article about how the only reason they got to 7nm was because they were abusing their less advanced methods by being willing to make a ton of faulty chips for every good one, and that it was incredibly inefficient and only feasible because of STATE INTERVENTION which is a free-market cheat code. Basically the human-wave attack propaganda but for microprocessors, lol.
Seems like they figured some things out on their own.
I just read an article about how the only reason they got to 7nm was because they were abusing their less advanced methods by being willing to make a ton of faulty chips for every good one
You always have low yield when developing new processes. You can't make a 7nm process by just running 14nm at high throughput/low yield. This is just R&D and process development.
Exactly right; IIRC just how many of the produced chips are actually functional is systematically kept secret by manufacturers, too, but there are a lot of duds.
Basically the human-wave attack propaganda but for microprocessors, lol.
The one with the rifle shoots. The one without zero follows. When the one with the rifle is killed, the one following zero picks up the rifle and shoots.
There were professional analysts who said this about the Kirin 9000c and then two weeks later had to eat crow as the chips became available and we're analyzed by third parties.
“7 nm”, “5 nm”, etc are all lies at this point. They mean nothing, just marketing terms. Nothing actually measures 5 nm. Idk what they’re doing to make the processors better, but it’s not shrinking the transistors as the name implies.
And since it’s a marketing term, there’s no objective way to measure it.
The term "5 nm" has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors being 5 nanometers in size. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a "5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers". However, in real world commercial practice, "5 nm" is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density (i.e. a higher degree of miniaturization), increased speed and reduced power consumption compared to the previous 7 nm process.
I haven't really dived into the IEEE standards here, but this is a real thing and not purely marketing. It is the resolution of the lithography. Due to the higher clock speeds and current resolutions, the capacitance and inductance of the elements set the size of transistors and routing, rather than just how small you can pattern them. So it is not directly increasing transistor density and processing power, but it means that you are patterning elements more accurately to what you designed and have less variation element to element. Meaning that things can be optimized and more consistent.
I admit the misfortune of most of this things being abstract and partially derived from the surrounding components, but we're also nearly into the territory that the last mile of improvements require the entire computer (e.g. RAM/wifi/GPU/disk) must all be embedded into the final chip.
that's interesting. I think it does still have to do with the amount of power being used for the chip? Like the Steam Deck LCD is 7nm i think and the new one i believe is 5nm, which doesnt make it faster it makes it more efficient and the battery lasts longer as a result.
Looks like they call it “6 nm” which is unusual. Yeah something is improved in the chip, but the marketing isn’t any kind of objective measure of that. Although I imagine most of the improved battery life comes from the bigger battery and more efficient OLED screen.
at the same voltage, smaller transistors don't necessarily lower power because it's easier for electrons to jump across the smaller gaps and leak power that way. but the smaller size usually enables reductions in voltage and shorter wires mean less losses to heat, which entails lower power draw.
Academics use smallest pitch distance to measure resolution. It is a real thing it's just not measuring the size of the transistors themselves (which would vary by design anyways and also that's not the only tuing you can microfabricate).
It's amazing how willing the US government is to do this, it would be very rough for the national governments if they just banned the import of these things in order to develop their own productive capacity. Xi and Putin should send Biden thank-you cards for helping them out so much.
It's really hilarious how much the old ghouls who were part of the creation of this new world order are aware that the absolute midwit shitbirds running the show today are tearing it down without meaning to. Mearsheimer is similar in being a real ghoul who can tell the dummies in charge now are doing imperialism wrong, and I get great enjoyment out of it.
You can import them, but I don’t know if the US has banned carriers for working with Chinese phones. I know a lot of dumb phones don’t work in the US because they’re blocked
You can, but most of those aren't very good, are too niche, and borrowing CPUs designed around the whims of Microsoft has me doubting their nativeness.
I was saying just the other day in another thread here that 5nm would be cracked by next year then it's a 5 or so year catch up to the final hurdles.
The optimist in me thinks 2 or 3 years before they crack 3nm and another 2 or 3 for 2nm. 6 years and they'll be on top with a manufacturing scale that is impossible for anyone else to replicate to be competitive with what they can produce.
In fairness they're still using overseas lithography machines that are increasingly restricted. They're going to need their own, and their own home-cooked versions, while really good, are currently at 28nm (A month ago it was 90nm so it's not as far behind as you might think).