Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I'm waiting for China to do for the US chip industry what Japan did to the US auto industry: come in and eat it from the bottom up with cheaper products that are initially dismissed as inferior toys until they move up the chain and eat the entire market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

View on HN

Unlike GM, Ford, Chrysler, the current big semiconductor producers, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are already excessively cost sensitive. There isn't a lot of extra overhead to suck out.

China can subsidize things at a loss (look at the solar cell manufacturers) until the volumes get big, but they can't maintain that too long once things take off.

That's a good point, but I wonder if coming up from below with a cleaner architecture might be able to accomplish something similar. Is MIPS64 cleaner than X86, and could this let them create lower power higher performance chips or manufacture equivalent performance chips at a lower cost?

http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/loongson-mips64-proce...

The benefit of a lack of a decode step (for arm vs x86, but I assume the analysis is roughly correct for mips) was estimated at RealWorldTech as about 5% of a core's energy. Given that the amount of energy the cores take up as a portion of the total energy budget, I doubt it would matter for high performance chips - particularly in the face of Intel's 1-2 process generation lead over everyone else.

Admittedly, phone chips are a bit lower power than desktop CPUs, but they are pretty beefy these days.

Dunno... 5% at data center scale could make a difference in the highly competitive cloud services market where margins are already fairly small.

I'm not sure it's comparable, the tool supply chain for one is very different. A Dutch company is the lithography tool supplier for both American and non American chip companies.

If Moore's law is over that could be less of an issue (old tooling will still be useful).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com