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.
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.
Asian Knockoff Mexicans
Mail order brides for those who can’t afford Eastern Europeans or East Asians
To the IQ obsessed HBD types, having the lowest PISA scores in Southeast Asia means we’re more Honorary Black than Honorary Aryan on the racial totem pole.
If the Russians were even half as petty and image obsessed as the Ukrainians are, they’d fire a missile into that trident.
Overextend, turn your enemy into insurgents, attempt to kill every one over ten of the “military aged males”, cause a global financial crisis, as a million people die due to your shit pandemic handling pull-out
The US is worse than Ukraine. They send their vassals to death without a second thought but with an inevitable betrayal. Yet if they ever fought a war in their own land for once, they’d quickly lose the will and ability to fight.
The Russians see East Ukrainians as Russians.
The US media othered Iraqis and Afghans so much that a certain group of Americans started attacking other Americans that were Muslims and/or of west/south-Asian descent.
The 1990 HDI of DPRK was higher than the Philippines, which is arguably more representative of what a US colony would actually look like when the Americans do not fund a significant portion of the state budget as they did in Park era SK.
1950s China, war torn with an agrarian economy, and an army under-equipped even by WW2 standards, pushed Dugout Doug back to the 38th parallel.
What makes them think today’s China, one that is now the foremost industrial power producing some of the most advanced UCAVs, hypersonics, destroyers, carriers, and 5th gen fighters in the world, is going to let 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.