How AMD Gave China the ‘Keys to the Kingdom’
wsj.com
wsj.com
The question is not “Why did AMD hand over all its IP to China,” the question is “Why did our incompetent government allow this to happen and why did they turn a blind eye to the strong arming that was going on?”
A further question is: “Why did only some (always smaller) tech companies fork over the IP while very large ones did not?”
Let me tell you a story about a fab in a distant country that begins with a C. The rumor was that it was a very expensive server fab. One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing. They locked down the factory for 48 hours and brought in a search team, scoured the building from bottom to top and then found nothing.
Then, as if by magic, the wafer appeared three feet away from where it went missing. Industrial espionage. And that is what you get when you are big.
What happens when you are small? They put a gun to your head (metaphorically) and say “Split off a company and hand it over to entities controlled by the Chinese government. All your IP will be shared with them. They will own the market in China and send you a royalty check and have the ability to modify your IP to build custom products. If you don’t like it, fuck off, no China for you.”
What lazy, incompetent and useless western journalists have been shockingly non curious about is why certain companies like Microsoft and Apple magically don’t seem to get this treatment.
It is almost as though....some other arrangement was getting made. No lazy western journalists to my knowledge have yet bothered to investigate why it is that Intel, Microsoft etc have not been forced to do these IP sharing agreements while AMD and others have.
One day, Lazy western journalists might be curious and get off their asses from Covering trump but somehow I doubt it.
Blaming AMD for “handing over the keys” is fucking stupid. It is the United States government’s lack of a spinal cord that is the problem. These companies had no choice. Either play the game or get shut out of the market.
Bad journalism, everywhere along with a lack of curiosity.
I assume you mean the mask set...
Also, you can steal important masks without anything being missing.
The US doesn't have China's system of rigid state control, and that's a good thing.
Conservative pundits are living in the 1990s. One reason Obama had to sideline hawks to cut the Iran nuclear deal is because China (among some other countries) made it clear that they were about to walk away from sanctions with Iran unless the U.S. sat down to hammer out a nuclear deal independent of Iran's missile programs. And as Trump's trade war has proven, China was fully prepared to make good on that threat.
Here's a story from yesterday which explains why Beijing made HK Chief Executive Lam apologize to Hong Kong protesters:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Xi-reverses-Hong-Kong-policy-with-Alibaba-and-North-Korea-in-mind
Beijing has been carefully managing China's transition to a domestic, consumption-oriented economy since the aughts (2000s). That's the background to the corporate espionage and two steps forward, one step back trade liberalization. Now they're having to accelerate that process; it's not what they wanted, but they're fully prepared to do it over caving to U.S. demands. They're making concessions, just ones that strengthen their tactical position in the tariff war and their long-term strategic position. In effect they're doubling down--the anti-competitive behavior was always a means to an end, and they're recommitting themselves to that end.
That U.S. demands are reasonable is beside the point. Long-term it's China with the winning hand. The irony is that it's the so-called realist conservatives, who proclaim that might makes right is a fact of nature, that fail to see that according their own rules their strategy is doomed to fail.
The U.S. is entering a phase, much like the U.K. before it, of managing its fall from power. If done well (better than the U.K. managed, not they they did an especially bad job of it), the U.S. can minimize the loss of relative strength and maximize its absolute strength, improving the lot of the world in the process. But if we don't accept this basic fact and instead overplay our hand, the consequences will be devastating relative to the best possible outcome--far less relative strength and, at best, treading water in terms of domestic wealth. Right now we're literally hastening our own demise--we're accelerating our descent by setting the stage to prove yet again (after Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, etc) our increasing impotence while rapidly depleting the goodwill, structural leverage, and other resources needed to manage the decline.
None of these points are novel, nor even (IMO) seriously contentious. With sober consideration they're all fairly self-evident. But there's a ton of motivated thinking going on in the U.S. right now.
> the U.S. can minimize the loss of relative strength and maximize its absolute strength
It's not an optimization problem that can be neatly solved. It going to be very chaotic. While the train tracks of where the story goes have been laid out, what happens on the train is mostly madness.
Your point about journalists. Maybe it's fair. Maybe they don't know what to look for or how to get/report it.
You seem to have an inside track. Why not reach out to some of them anonymously and do a public service?
I can recommend a few very good ones who would be interested if you don't know some already.
Most journalists lack curiosity, most engineers lack the ability to teach things to anyone who is tech-ignorant.
Microsoft regularly shares Windows source code with foreign governments for them to inspect.
From 2003 https://www.infoworld.com/article/2681548/china-gets-access-...
A nation state can easily do it if they want. The US govt (NSA) has even devloped a reverse engineering tool and open sourced it.
"Apple hasn’t provided any information on the matter and did not respond to requests for comment. But analysts said the most likely interpretation is that the company is giving Beijing access to its operating system source code in return for being able to continue to do business in China—arguably Apple’s most important market, but one that has been imperiled by regulatory obstacles"
https://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese...
Think Open Source Android vs. Google's Android, or Chromium vs. Chrome. It's not just dragging and dropping some UI libraries on top. There's a ton of glue, and sticking shims into non-obvious places that make a lot of the magic happen.
That sounds very much how our socialist economy worked, glad you've decided to try the same approach we did from 1945-1990. Maybe THIS TIME it'll actually perform better than the very successful free markets of 20th century. ;)
Seriously - the most successful US companies are global corporations which have major presence in EMEA and APAC markets. They also have rather large control over communications and news fields. What do you think will happen in those non-US markets if those corporations start to be a vessel for American propaganda and foreign policy bullying? How long do you think it'll take before they find themselves banned and pushed out of non-US markets?
It's not the companies that are the problem, it's the requirements being imposed on them by foreign governments. The failure is on the part of the US government in not protecting US companies from unreasonable technology transfer requirements etc.
Maybe foreigners do not think it's unreasonable ?
Are you sure about that ? The US already provides huge help to US companies at the determinant to other countries.
No technology transfer would mean higher tariff from East Asia.
China wont stop until their GDP per capita matches that of Japan / South Korea.
What gain does the US think to get here except having everything spiral into regressive and dangerous pre-WW1 mercantilism?
You could argue that the UK would side with India and project power there assuming we actually get our carriers out there.
I don't think that sales volume is the only metric to be taken into consideration here. No matter what degree of culpability you assign to each party, the US and China are countries with an increasing level of hostility towards one another. Why should America permit what are ostensibly American companies from openly trading high technology with an increasingly hostile nation? Especially technology which is of military significance. I'm sure there were similar restrictions in place during the Cold War. I'm not advocating that the west returns to similar policies, but this might be the direction that we're forced to progress in for our wellbeing's sake.
LOL sorry but a wafer isn't worth billions, single digits millions, maybe 10-20 million tops
The bit about big versus small -- China pulls the same tact with virtually all foreign companies, even making Apple and others play the China game. Intel was expressly forbidden by congress of sell or licensing server chips in China, and AMD went in to try to eek a small profit in the void.
Author forgot about Sunway TaihuLight, the top supercomputer in the TOP500 at the time the transfer happened, using a completely domestic CPU architecture.
> The AMD deal gave China access to state-of-the-art x86chips, which are made by only two companies in the world: AMD and Intel Corp.
Author forgot about Zhaoxin. The new LuJiaZui in particular is really interesting.
It can be traced back to DEC's ALPHA chips.
Similar to Loongson, which used the MIPS ISA, but a homegrown design.
Both Intel and Global Foundries are trapped on older nodes, and China is in a slightly worse position (with their most advanced node being 14nm).
All of AMD's new cores are built on TSMC 7nm, and with outdated nodes & 3 revision old designs, China is unlikely to be able to significantly improve on the designs they licensed from AMD.
Arguably, China doesn't have the homegrown talent to do chip design. Allwinner yeets barely altered SOC designs from ARM into existence, and Hygon's chip design talent is in large part not China based.
Frankly both of those statements are true of all major industrial nations.
Though I don’t trust this. I guess, this money will be accessible only to companies having dedicated departments writing grants (like the big car companies) and it will be wasted at the end. This country should start immediately increasing salaries in research institutions and stop that nonsense with many many 1 year contracts for scientific staff.
When it comes to IC design more broadly, just put in Google/DDG the name of an industrial nation and a couple other related words, and enjoy the results.
I could think of more if it was my job, but I don't see why you'd dismiss it out of hand. Why would it be so personally important to you that the Chinese government is seen as greatest state sponsor of microarchitectural research using RISC-V?
Not a coincidence the US usually has a carrier battle group somewhere between the two.
Cross straight relations is a definite hotspot, China (PRC) maintain Taiwan is still their territory.
The US has traditionally sat as a buffer to prevent China asserting that militarily but with the US becoming more isolationist and the Chinese rapid expanding their blue fleet capabilities it's only a matter of time until things get...tense.
The USA hasn't sent an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait since 2007. Barring some major geopolitical shakeup, it is fairly likely it will never do so again.
The US has traditionally used Taiwan as yet another military foothold in the Asia-Pacific to project and exert its own influence in the region for geopolitical objectives, the containment of China being one of them.
A far more likely scenario would be where the US undertakes overt military action against Iran, wasting money and resources while China sits back and consolidates power in its own sphere of influence.
Is that supposed to make Americans feel any better? :) Seriously the Chinese government still thinks of Taiwan (and on a bad day Korea) as one of its provinces and given its location it could easily become one again.
International apathy is at an all time high, thanks to most countries dealing with internal political issues (which in most cases involve rigth wing groups and fake news)
Taiwan is an island. Sending a column of tanks there isn't something the PLA could just do overnight. They'd need to get a warship past Taiwan's naval and aerial defenses in the first place before they could even think of invading with tanks.
Yeah yeah, sure, it could happen. And if it did the last thing any of us would be concerned about is whether or not AMD shared innapropriate technology.
Just wait for the Americans to run out of cash to pay for the aircraft carriers around it...
Dear lord.
1. Patterson and Hennessy revolutionised CPU design with little more than grad students
2. ARM recounts how Western Digital's design bureau was little more than a suburban house
3. Apple merrily makes its own CPUs
4. China has already made more than one CPU - mainly MIPS.
The good (or bad news) is we are all about to find out.
With the PA-RISC design team.
nothing to do with HP's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC
Simple question: Chinese money saved AMD in 2013 when the stock was less than 2.5$ and the company almost dead. Why did the USA not pay for their own technology, rather than complaining 6 years later when this investment is now becoming fruitful?
> Three weeks after getting the top job, Ms. Su, a Taiwan-born New Yorker, jetted to Beijing to meet officials at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. A Chinese vice minister urged her to partner with China “to achieve mutual benefits based on AMD’s technological strength,” according to a ministry press release at the time.
I assume the message is: ZOMG, foreigners are giving away US technology!
Of course, since this involves selling chips to a CCP-adjacent entity, it's no longer a story about how AMD saw a 10x boost in its stock and brought competitive new products to the market.
But of course you can expect the WSJ to spin it this way.
Or: how China invested in AMD when its stock price was at historical low, so in return AMD gave China its x86 secrets and Zen architecture.
There was no U.S. investor willing to make a $300 million investment in a company that held key CPU and GPU technology and world-class engineering expertise. Apple, Google, Microsoft could have benefited from AMD's CPU/GPU tech but they would rather make multi-billion dollar offers for companies like Groupon and Snapchat or Dr Dre's Beats.
An American company was saved by this joint venture with China while Wall Street was gleefully shorting AMD.
Or the US government. Given the national security implications, and investment may have been a wise thing to do.
I don't know the financial situation for AMD was at 2014 and they might have ceased to exists for all I know. But the article writes as if the money itself turned the company around. It's the R&D and design of a new chip that heralded a new era for AMD. And if I'm reading correctly the deal actually ended up being done in 2016 by which time most of the work on Zen was already done I presume.
As someone else said in another comment it is kind of shameful how investment works. Forget about China/US thing, chip development is important work and no one invested in it properly. For big cloud companies simply the pressure over intel (with a competitive AMD) should have been worth it by itself.
If only this article had substantial content... but, as other commenters pointed out, it doesn't even pass the basic smell test.
By real competition I mean someone with both the same skill level and the same heft/weight.
If you look at how the US reacted when Japan was rising, it wasn't a pretty view. It only died down because Japan stagnated 2 decades ago.
China's kind of the same story, but if it stagnates at about the same level at Japan, the Chinese economy will be 2-3x the US economy.
That's super scary if you haven't competed on equal footing for more than half a century.
Obviously, China being an autocratic regime doesn't help either, or that China's national interests in the region directly conflict with the US interests there (Taiwan, South Korea, etc.).
I'd bet dollars to cents that even if China had the most pristine Swiss democracy, the US reaction would be 99% the same.
Some people don't like the idea of a totalitarian state being a world power with top-notch technology.
Don't you listen to the news ? Everything China is bad. /s
Are we entering a space-race with China for supercomputers or something? Did I miss the memo?
What has surprised me most is the difference in awareness and framing between the Chinese and Americans I have spoken with (though obviously "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes").
When I speak with Chinese friends, and contemporaries in tech sectors, many view the current state of US-Chinese economic conflicts in two parts: a trade war and a related-but-separate "tech war". Speaking with Americans, among those who work in the technology sector, less than half see there being a separate "tech war", outside/beyond the context of the tariffs and related trade negotiations.
Outside of tech, no Americans I have spoken to see there being a separate tech war, and it is entirely contextualized in President Trump's current trade war framing.
As for Chinese nationals outside of tech, I have far fewer conversations. I did recently speak with a gentleman from a maritime BRI project in Africa (i.e. very removed from tech). He nonetheless seemed to hold a pride for recent Chinese technological advances as a part of his identity (or personality?) and viewed it as outside/beyond the specific incidentals of the current trade war. He was happy to be working on the BRI, but he thought that it was less important than the technology contest.
My guess is that a lot of it comes down to intentional framing and emphasis in popular news media?
American software companies dominate tech and internet in both mindshare and profits throughout the world, excluding China. Despite them "stealing" all this IP.
Sure, the US may not be able to compete in China, but the openness of the US meant that the rest of Asia, Europe, Africa America's were willing to buy their products.
When the US engages in nationalistic trade wars, it loses China's market which was never really available to it. But it also gives Europeans and Asians and Africans an excuse to exclude the US from their markets.
Any country wanting to do that, which I suspect a lot of them will now that Trump has decided he just wants to fight trade wars despite the US being the biggest winner of the current economic system, simply needs to point to the well known American spying to ignore American suppliers and software companies and developers.
The US may come out net better in the relationship with China but it's gonna lose a lot more. (it won't even here...China had been giving America TVs and computers and what not for pieces of paper. If you told an alien this deal they wouldnt believe the US is complaining. The US's problem is entirely that it hasn't been able to distribute this massive wealth surplus it has enjoyed throughout it's society, because it has prioritized the ability of the richest to hoard that wealth to the point they don't even have islands left to buy, instead of providing healthcare to the poorest).
Most likely the US will increase its advantage overall during this time, as China's Government puts itself into a straight-jacket along with its most talented people. As opposed to unleashing them in Deng-style with further liberalization.
China can never have a full answer in terms of exports vs the US software juggernaut. That's inherent to their system of extreme government controls and limitations. Why would anybody in the West ever use Baidu, Ctrip, or Chinese equivalents of Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Slack, DocuSign, Fortinet, Github, GitLab, Splunk, Twilio, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, et al? There are dozens of booming enterprise companies in the US in that mold, China inherently can't compete with most of them globally. That also goes for the burgeoning software companies in the 'West' outside of the US, such as Atlassian and Shopify (both with $30b market caps). There is a reason why AWS is globally dominant, while China's cloud providers are lagging by five years or more (both in service offerings and sales size) - businesses in the West mostly won't go anywhere near China's cloud services and never will. It's another case of their companies being firewalled inside of China.
To the parent's point re allies, Trump is a mess, however he is gone after one or two terms. US allies generally understand this is a speed bump in a very long-term relationship. Xi's authoritarianism is practically guaranteed to increase by the year for a long time to come. It's going to get worse. Dictatorships become more aggressive and paranoid with time, rather than less.
In my view this is the most probable scenario but there are also some advantages they have. One I find particularly valuable is that most of its government is constituted of engineers (70% if I remember correctly) vs. in the US most are some sort of Lawyers (?).
It is really interesting how this will play out in the mid/long term. I am kind of bullish on the western countries though they are all (especially here in europe) shooting their own feet by killing their most valuable asset: their free markets.
What matters in a politician is primarily gathering wisdom from around the population and combining, synthesising it into policy. Reality is complex, nobody can see the big picture, there are millions of factors that can affect any nation-level decision. See it as hand-crafted logic (dictatorship/engineers) vs machine learning (votes/lawyers). Lawyering is likely especially suited to creating decent leaders because the heart of being a (trial) lawyer is debate and being able to represent people who you may not only disagree with, but actively suspect are criminals. You have to do your best to be the devils advocate anyway - which is a good skill to have if your job is or should be primarily implementing the decisions of the electorate.
There always has to be some fear-based narrative involving the boogeyman de jour - the Russians, the Chinese, Islamic extremists, cyberwar whatever. Any one will do, anything to deflect from real problems at home.
God I detest the politics of today :(
and so was slavery for a long time.
Humanity needs to shed the tribalism from which it was forged. The current political paradigm requires that the politicians to divide and conquer, because most people aren't able to really see what's real and what's propaganda (which makes propaganda so effective). I don't have a solution to this problem unfortunately, but until this is solved, world climate change or inter-planetary colonization (or any other big endeavour) won't happen.
But western countries are slowly-slowly creeping towards something else, something bordering on Orwellian.
They hype the boogeyman de jour to the nth degree, using fear, uncertainty and doubt to control the populace and justify ever-more overarching anti-privacy, anti-encryption, and mass surveillance laws. It's at the point where it seems like most people now accept such sweeping controls, because of course it's all to keep them safe.
They start wars based on faked evidence and the flimsiest of reasoning. War crimes are covered up and whistleblowers treated as the villans - non-western lives mean nothing to these people, who will do everything they can to grab more power, and enrich their coffers and that of their cronies.
So, it's not just about the choice of political system, or "Them and Us" - it's also about the profiteering, corruption, cronyism and borderline megalomaniac that have somehow become normalised. Perhaps worst of all is the simply staggering hypocrisy.
However, the "red danger" of the Soviets was (IMHO) an existential risk to freedom--just as the Poles why they fought for free multi-party elections. The rising influence of China, a totalitarian state, is a cause for concern. Why would you think a dictatorship growing more powerful is a good thing?
> Any one will do, anything to deflect from real problems at home.
As a society/civilization, I would think it would be possible to walk and chew gum at the same time: raise concerns about bad actors abroad and try to solve domestic problems.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism: > Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life
> Article 1. The People's Republic of China is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China. Sabotage of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.
* http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/con...
"was" being the operative word, although I think the reality was more nuanced than "those commies are gonna get us!".
> The rising influence of China, a totalitarian state, is a cause for concern. Why would you think a dictatorship growing more powerful is a good thing?
It's not totalitarian state or a dictatorship. I also didn't say the rising influence of China was a good thing - but I'm not saying it's a terrible thing either.
What I do find to be of concern, is western politics, corruption, FUD spreading and war-mongering.
Well, they call them themselves a dictatorship. See Article 1 of the CN Constitution:
> Article 1. The People's Republic of China is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China. Sabotage of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.
* http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/con...
:)
[1] https://symbiflow.githib.io
[2] https://github.com/freechipsproject/chisel3
For starters, there is a throwaway graph (in that it is not directly addressed in the article) of the Top500 over time. As Patrick Kennedy at STH has rightly complained on over recent years [0], there is a rising issue with taking the lower-to-mid ranks of Top500 to mean anything at all. A lot of the systems are actually web hosting platforms, being temporarily leveraged to run an HPC benchmark for marketing purposes. Most recently he called out two Chinese companies (Lenovo and Sugon) as among the largest offenders.
My other nitpick is more core to the article: it is not as if no one in China knew anything about x86 chip design before talking to AMD. Though I will admit I am underinformed on the NatSec legalities, to my knowledge there has a similar x86 license-and-joint-venture structure between Zhaoxin and VIA for many years.
The article goes on to say:
>Chinese versions of AMD chips already have been rolling off production lines.
Which brings up some ominous analogues to displacement of other American products by Chinese manufacturing. That may be inaccurate imagery, though, as it isn't clear which manufacturer's fabs are being used for the Dhyana chips. I am no industry insider but from what I can tell Hygon is fabless (as is Huawei's HiSilicon, for that matter) and I could not find any clear information as to who is actually manufacturing the chips [1]. Does anyone here know?
I'll keep my uninformed speculation to myself, but knowing whose fabs and whose process technology actually led to working Hygon designs being realized in silicon is an important detail to fully tell this tale.
Now I have no doubt China is working to catch up in this area as well, but it seems that the entire fabrication ecosystem (including companies like ASML, not just Taiwanese and American fabs) represent technology gaps equal to x86 chip design. It takes many actors to put on this play, and laying it all at AMD's feet, or using phrasing like "gave away the keys to the kingdom" feels like a solid overstatement.
[0] https://www.servethehome.com/top500-june-2019-our-new-system...
A) they didn't already have nukes
B) making your own x86 processors were a prerequisite to nuclear technology
The processing power at oak ridge et al AFAIK is spent trying to recover old warheads without testing them, which is a massively harder problem.
Edit: and the Chinese have had their DD-ZF publicly for years now. I feel like they have to have warheads for it. Given where we've known about what warheads they have when, it'd make sense for that to be available currently.
It helps in the future but for this scenario, it makes not difference.
Also, as AMD entered the deal voluntarily, it means that it was considered profitable despite the risks.
And I don't see the problem with building a supercomputer. Is it a privilege that shouldn't be available to developing countries?
Perhaps it would be wise for people to keep that filter in mind (as this is how mass manipulation works folks).
I just cannot understand why China building it’s own jets is a problem. US already builds it’s own jets and nobody hates that to the point ‘Let’s not partnership with US to not leak any info’.
Why is this particular dislike to China?̊̈ Is it just the ‘Communism is bad...’ thing?̊̈ Or is it something much more?̊̈
No in the conventional sense, but they have spread their ideology to such an extent that most people on earth won't draw a cartoon of a particular historical character using their real name.
That's real power projection, all fear.
I'm not sure if it is a coincidence that Americans always come across some bad guys, or finding an enemy is a necessity to justify US military industrial complex.
Whatever billions the US has earned selling weapons to KSA are a drop in the bucket compared to what it's spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan. These are all countries where KSA has funded extremist political movements that continue to destabilize the region.
This goes for all aspect of society. From how we raise our children to how big ecological challenges are met.
Plus right now in the US. There is the upcoming election where I think Trump has figured out he can win by being tough on China and the slew articles you are seeing is a part of a political campaign.
Even if China building its own jets isn't a problem, China building jets based on US designs (acquired through Israel IIRC) is a problem. That expensive design process was underwritten by the US government - i.e. by the taxpayers - to achieve the strategic goal of maintaining a certain balance of military power. If those designs then end up in the hands of our rivals, then the taxpayers' money was totally wasted.
BTW this has nothing to with whether the strategic goal is valid, whether that money should have been spent, etc. My own answers to those questions would tend to be negative. What I'm getting at is that having the designs leaked or stolen destroys even what value might have existed in the minds of proponents.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/
:)
cough-Israel-Wintel-lobbyists-cough
The housing industry would grind to a halt pretty quickly.
You'd get actual paperless offices though!
I guess you mean China didn't have the technological framework to produce hightech products. I am not sure I agree, but I don't have numbers to support any claim.
So yes, it's a major achievement and there's a lot of knowledge layered on top of that equipment, but it's not like they need to reinvent everything from scratch.
Amazon's revenue is about USD$240b.
For context, the US DoD SPENDS about USD$100b on research, development, test, and evaluation activities alone.
So if a G20 government decides they want top of the line gear, they can afford it.
In a sense, it's kind of like a nuclear plant -- you can't not consider the site and physical structure as part of the operation.
I wouldn't be surprised if those parts are the secret sauce for a lot of cutting edge fabs. How do you isolate your space while moving materials about? What do you clean, when, and how?
We gave industrial engineers crap at my school, but for semiconductor fabrication the holistic approach seems necessary.
(Would love to hear more details from someone)
The actual manufacturing is done in Taiwan (TSMC) and South Korea (Samsung). USA can do it too (Intel, Global Foundries) but these are either not leading edge or only for private use.
SMIC in China are up to 14nm: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13941/smics-14-nm-mass-produc...
Everyone uses equipment from the Netherlands (ASML).
> they couldn't manufacture ballpoint pens domestically until 2017
They were already producing 38 billion ballpoint pens a year. Just the tips had to be imported because domestic steel was too low-grade.
Since they weren't given assistance in learning steel production techniques it had to be rediscovered. Chinese steel is now high-quality enough to produce the ballpoint tips, but building up R&D is important for reasons beyond pens; the responsible state-owned-enterprise developed several new techniques, and is (apparently) the only company in the world able to produce e.g. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/24/WS5cbfc4a9a31048422...
This is funny, because besides ASML, Europe is very light on the chip manufacturing. Sure, there's ARM, but they don't have foundries. All this talk about geopolitics and computing, chips, foundries, and every single company and thus country is dependent on this one equipment vendor from a tiny and otherwise unimportant country, and nobody seems to bat an eye.
It makes me wonder whether maybe all this geopolitical scheming and fearmongering is way overblown. Why does it matter if country Y can make chips themselves or buy them from country X? What is this, a world full of little soviet unions? I mean, we have trade, and trade works! I think in the long run trade will always win over protectionism.
ftfy.
My bic byros have not particularly precise balls, made from not particularly hard balls. If you pop one out and wash it, you can see the surface roughness and imperfections. Some other brands of pen use glass balls!
I think the claim in this thread is false...
"A year ago Premier Li Keqiang went on national television and bemoaned the failure of his country to produce a good quality version of this seemingly-simple implement.
Locally-made versions felt "rough" compared to those from Germany, Switzerland and Japan, Mr Li complained."
>https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/01/26/china-ca...
> Premier Li Keqiang recently made a shocking revelation about the industrial capabilities of China on national television: despite the fact that the country is widely known as the “world’s factory” and produces everything from iPhones, aircraft carriers, high-speed railways to spacecraft. Until now there is not a single manufacturer in China that is able to produce the tiny rotating ball fitted to the tip of a ball pen that disperses ink as you write.
> Each of these tiny metal balls has to be imported by Chinese pen manufacturers from overseas suppliers.
I assume the 90% figure was rounded up to "all of them", potentially by Li Keqiang himself, who was probably not interested in low-quality ballpoint pens that could be made without high-precision manufacturing equipment.
It's not entirely unbelievable that they couldn't do this to a sufficient standard at all. I'm just saying it's more believable that they could, but couldn't do it to an excellent standard.
The Chinese juggernaut is based on cheap labour (or until very recently at least), if you automate something enough, they cant make an inroad. Chopsticks and pen tips are examples of things that are very highly automated.