My guess is that the people laughing about how hot and slow these chips are now won't be doing so in 5 to 10 years.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that China isn't capable of building an efficient and powerful CPU or not, but will they, at any point, catch up to contemporary CPUs from Intel, AMD, Apple, etc.?
I'm not saying they won't deliver useful silicon but they won't be delivering comparable silicon. And it'll be under trade embargo no doubt due to the IP issues so they will have a very limited market to scale into.
This happened before (GDR) and the products were never competitive.
I think the best thing they have done though is kick out compatible ATmega parts and the STM32 parts. They're really killing it there.
IIRC, Loongson was a straight copy of MIPS with the names changed (in the first few iterations, at least).
This was created for their own domestic market. China's goal is achieve independence of foreign technology. With 1.3 billion people they have a very large market.
This is also called learning by doing. This is how skill and expertise is most efficiently developed in the very beginning.
This trope of assuming that copying is inherently valueless or devoid of creativity or innovation is simply wrong, and comes from an implicit assumption of superiority of the self.
They may not innovate as much as you expect now. But they are building a foundation for future innovation.
Also: Huawei is still leader in 5G technology, with the best products. You should look at their patents, they own the majority of 5G patents.
GigaDevice and WCH have completely new MCUs now based on RISC-V. They keep the STM32 peripheral register interface for easy driver re-use, but they are well beyond mere copies these days.
Closest may be SMIC 7nm on multi patterning, which they cannot produce at scale and is still 2-3 generations behind TSMC [0]
Canon nanoimprint will not be available to China either.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/contextualizing-national-secur...
But no one had ever beaten Intel in 50 years, until someone did.
There’s no monopoly on knowledge and I wouldn’t bet against the world’s second economy with its government directly financing a strategic sector.
"They can't buy machines from this Swiss company!" is not really much of a barrier when we look at the resources they have available. Over 12 months, that is a problem for them. Maybe 5 years. In a decade, ASML relying very heavily on the CCP shooting themselves and their people in the foot to still be a differentiator.
When talking about the sheer scale of 10% of the globe's population, you need a lot more than one technical dot point to say they can't do something.
Don’t disagree with your general point though. Also there is always the option of industrial espionage as we have seen.
Leaving the politics aside, it will be interesting to see what technical solutions emerge if the ‘easy’ option of spending a few hundred million dollars on a couple of EUV machines isn’t available.
And I'd assume the answer is spending a few billion dollars developing a couple of EUV machines over a long time. It isn't like a billion dollars is much money and the Chinese economy is reaching the point where people will be looking to muscle in to precision manufacturing. It isn't like cheap labour is an option any more. They've already overwhelmed the Europeans in a bunch of phone and computer related areas so there is evidence that the Europeans probably can't maintain a competitive edge if the Chinese want to get good at something.
Honestly, given what happened with the iPhone and Nokia I don't know how anyone is placing faith in the Chinese not being able to catch up. European tech companies have a history of looking unbeatable until they're just knocked completely out of the race. If anything the threat is that Europe won't be able to keep up with Asia.
China is not the first to take a crack at this. Attempts to replicate and catch up with American and European chipmaking and computing efforts go back to the dawn of the discipline, and had involved some of the largest economies of their times, yet here we are.
We now know it works. Before, why should China bother when they can just buy from western suppliers and TSMC instead? Now we gave China no other choice but to invest 10-20 years into this until they have something that works. This is why you see all the chip manufacturing equipment makers in China have something like 150-200% YoY growth in the past 3 years. Their R&D centers are pursuing multiple avenues to make sub-5nm chips possible. Not only multiple avenues of making EUV work, but also non-EUV avenues. It just so happens that starting this year we know that nanoimprint lithography works, and is cheaper than EUV. Huawei's newest CPU performs on par with CPUs on smaller nodes. That's because Huawei invested heavily in CPU design and heat dissipation technology. They haven't even gone into advanced packaging yet.
Will they stay behind western technology forever because we have an R&D lead? People who claim this are ignoring a big factor: they will no longer be able to profit from Chinese buyers. These profits are necessary for future R&D investment, which is necessary to maintain the lead and R&D speed.
That's debatable.
Samsung, a behemoth in Korea and one of the largest holdings in the world, has tried to compete with TSMC at the same node size, and failed so far.
> Will they stay behind western technology forever because we have an R&D lead? People who claim this are ignoring a big factor: they will no longer be able to profit from Chinese buyers.
Doesn't this work the other way around as well? Chinese companies in the same space will not be able to profit from EU and North American customers, historically the largest spenders.
> Doesn't this work the other way around as well?
It does. But the difference is:
- They're coming from behind and enjoy latecomer's advantage. They can take advantage of western R&D results. They may not be able to obtain all the details, but just knowing that a particular R&D path is viable is already an advantage.
- They have a captive market thanks to sanctions.
- They're coming from a smaller size. Chinese semiconductor companies had such small market share that capturing even a small part of only the Chinese market already translates to tremendous growth. They can only go up while the western supply chain will go down.
Finally, there's the global south which is also growing. This is a huge market that they can sell to. In the future, western suppliers will have to compete with Chinese suppliers in this market, even if Chinese suppliers are locked out of western markets.
That wording is a bit harsh. They haven't failed, but they haven't been able to compete at scale, which is what matters.
> They're coming from behind and enjoy latecomer's advantage. They can take advantage of western R&D results.
Isn't that the main issue, that they can't?
> They have a captive market thanks to sanctions.
That isn't true. Current sanctions target exports of certain consumer and professional products, none of which are chips as far as I understand; and imports of certain products branded strategic such as AI related hardware.
> They're coming from a smaller size. Chinese semiconductor companies had such small market share that capturing even a small part of only the Chinese market already translates to tremendous growth.
I don't think this means anything in this context. Capturing a larger chunk of a single market doesn't even mean that they are better than most at what they do, just that their go to market strategy is more effective than their competitors. SMIC could be releasing chips with comically large transistors, as long as their scale and prices are preferable to those of their competitors.
> They can only go up while the western supply chain will go down.
This is wishful thinking, at best. But again, growth means nothing here. SMIC could "grow" a 1000% for all I care, and it wouldn't move the needle.
> Finally, there's the global south which is also growing. This is a huge market that they can sell to.
That depends highly on China and their allies. China may capture markets in Africa, but it is actively alienating most of Asia Pacific, minus perhaps Russia.
That is commercially significant and entitles TSMC to bragging rights and huge profits. But if China fails like Samsung, they're at no strategic disadvantage at all and the US technology embargo will have effectively failed to do anything.
China is in no position of "failing like Samsung", right now. At most, they may fail like Samsung did five years ago.
It would also mean that the sanctions worked.
They have spent significiant resources in hoovering as much information as possible from companies that have data of interest.
Cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_pr...
And now RISC-V is likely to pretty much wipe them out.
The issue is whether China will get behind the RISC-V stuff and contribute to a semi-unified ecosystem or whether the individual companies will fuck it up by balkanizing everything in an attempt to one-up their competitors. I'm not optimistic.
The West mostly doesn't really care about RISC-V. ARM licensing costs don't seem to be completely out of line unless you are talking super-cheap devices--which mostly come from China.
(A good counterexample is Nordic Semiconductor. They are having to compete against cheap Chinese BLE alternatives so they needed to start looking at RISC-V).
And my point is that if RISC-V achieves a significant amount of open designs and tooling then anyone who joins is roughly speaking guaranteed parity (in design - something like ISA and microarchitecture, not in foundry). Which is much better than the current situation.
This is one (of many) advantages of open source software. If you have access to the source, you can build it on a ridiculously wide range of hardware. I've been downright shocked over the years at some of the strange things people have run actually useful (and entertaining) open source software on. Doom runs pretty much everywhere just for one example. ;)
also, the unix dependcy graph is formidable and needs to be supported to just bootstrap.
AFAIK Loongson's ISA is some sort of superset of MIPS64. Not exactly ubiquitous but MIPS64 has been around for a while so I would expect bootstrapping to be fairly simple.
Of course, bootstrapping is not the same as, say, using the parts of the superset that help with x86 emulation to speed things up, but even QEMU has supported LoongArch since 7.1 (over a year ago.)
The custom ISA becomes a real problem if you need Windows and other closed source software on it, but China has declared it political goal to rid itself its dependency on Microsoft.
LoongBT, faster x86 and ARM binary translation, 213 instructions