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Comment by metildaa | Hacker News Reader

Zen 2 is designed for a 7nm process, which limits its production to TSMC or Samsung. There is nowhere to build AMD's newer chips in China (unlike 14nm Ryzen), stopping them from using the tariff bypass they did through this JV. This lack of bleeding edge fabs in China is unlikely to change soon.

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I don’t think there’s tariff on CPUs due to an international agreement of zero tariff on IT goods. Edit: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/inftec_e/inftec_e.htm

Hrm, citation? I'm just reiterating what I heard from an AMD employee that took me out for drinks. AMD needed the $200 million to survive and thought there were market segments they could not access in China, but a JV would not be encumbered in that manner.

By the time the JV's chips would be in volume production, it would be 2 generations behind, thus not eating AMD's existing Chinese customer base.

Edit: Nice un-noted edit...

I didn’t mean to throw you off. Added “Edit” to make the thread coherent.

Forgive my ignorance of this domain, but what's preventing China from pilfering the necessary talent from Taiwan to develop its own 7 nm tech? Wouldn't there be numerous economically (and politically) irresistible incentives working to make this happen?

Sure, but China has a less competent industrial espionage than Israel, who has failed to steal the secrets of TSMC's or Samsungs processes for Intel (leaving them trapped on 14nm with a really broken 10nm node in development).

As it turns out, bleeding edge silicon lithography is massively expensive, and the cost to build newer processes balloons every generation. Most of the secrets of each process aren't generalizable between vendors (like how transplanting a design from TSMC 14nm to Global Foundries 14nm would take a fair bit of engineering work).

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