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Comment by CravAnon | Hacker News Reader

I suspect with the embargo on Intel, China is highly motivated to push ARM ahead of Intel quickly. If you think Phytium and the Chinese government aren't tied at the hip you're kidding yourselves. Sure, they can't fab at 14nm but they likely will soon.

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They can fab on 14/10nm just like all the other Chinese soc companies do, MediaTek is doing 20, 16 and 10nm SoC's if they couldn't they wouldn't be competitive regardless of their price.

They sure can fab it elsewhere, just not in mainland china is what he meant imho.

But they aren't fabbing it in mainland China anyhow, these CPUs were fabbed in TSMC, the 28nm foundries in china aren't really capable of producing silicon as complex as this one. China will get there, it is a national priority for them and it is understandable they need to move from being the factory of the world to becoming an innovation and R&D center sure they are literally hacking their way there but they'll get there.

China is aggressive and very intelligent with their goals and roadmaps in complete contrast to other emerging mega-nations like India, and sadly even in contrast to Europe which seem to have both the financial and the human capital to become a world leader however lacks the the will and the uniform vision to achieve that.

Don't get me wrong Europe is doing some amazing things in research especially in the academic scene and programs like Horizon 2020 are pretty impressive but they are peanuts in the grand scheme of things, China on the other hand says in 10 years I want to be able to make X and they get there doesn't matter if X is canned goods or high end CPUs.

China is the US in the 50's be the 1st in everything, do huge national projects to get there, invest in science, technology and education all for the national pride and glory. As much as I'm "scared" of China I really admire their moonshot spirit in the past decades if they won't implode before getting there I hope they'll end up being benevolent overlords.

China will have to get there on their own, however; no one is willing to share such fab technology with them, or sell them equipment like Germany does for much of their manufacture base. It will take a while with the current mindset of cheap/cut corners work, they are having the same problem with jet engines (more careful and precise, less cheap!). They can't really just throw money at the problems either...not when management takes huge cuts and then outsources to the traditional cheap/cut corner vendors.

Or they could just invade Taiwan for its fabs.

No one is in production at 10nm yet.

TSMC is tapping out 10nm, MediaTek is going to release the Helio X30 in Q1 2017 on their 10nm process.

Indeed, even TSMC executives noted its 10 and 7nm nodes will have minimum feature sizes of about 20 and 14nm, respectively. (from http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329217)

Yeah overall feature size isn't 1 to 1 with the "process" anymore, hasn't been there for a long time.

All of them use various sub-wavelength techniques like using multiple stencils and masks to create aperture / fresnel lense like effects etc.

Pretty much since you have multiple measurements for "feature size" like fin, gate, interconnect pitch etc. companies are just naming their process roadmap to show "progress". I don't think even Intel's 14nm process actually has a 14nm "feature size" and if it does I don't know what measurement they are basing it on.

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8367/14nmFeatureSize.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8367/14nmFinfet2.png

They are literally tied up at the top.

Phytium is a subsidiary of China Electronics Corporation which is a state owned enterprise.

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