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Comment by metildaa | Hacker News Reader

The author also omitted that China has no bleeding edge foundries (like TSMC & Samsung's 7nm fabs) and it is unlikely they will be able to build one any time soon.

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All of AMD's new cores are built on TSMC 7nm, and with outdated nodes & 3 revision old designs, China is unlikely to be able to significantly improve on the designs they licensed from AMD.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.

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I wouldn't say they don't have the talent. Whether they do or not, they could get it very quickly. What is holding back Chinese foundries has more to do with legal architectures than human talent. A 7nm facility is a huge investment, takes years to develop, and is very location-specific. The few corporations capable of creating such a facility are hesitant to sink the required capital, energy and tradecraft into a facility in China. The long-term risks are too much for this very sensitive business.

> Arguably, China doesn't have the homegrown talent to do chip design

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.

> Apple merrily makes its own CPUs

With the PA-RISC design team.

The acquired team was P.A. Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

nothing to do with HP's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC

> The author also omitted that China has no bleeding edge foundries (like TSMC & Samsung's 7nm fabs)

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.

So the reason China might win the trade war is that... they'll just start a world war? That seems a little out of scope. Yes, they might invade Taiwan. That would be rather worse for everyone than if they won/lost the race for CPU dominance.

russia solved their oil supply problem anexing a neighboring country and no sign of a world war. why do you think china anexing taiwan would start one (also, remember china already sent a column of tanks there one nigth and again, nothing happened with the world)

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)

> remember china already sent a column of tanks there one nigth

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.

He is just saying that Chinese dependence on Taiwan for cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing is not that big a vulnerability. Even disregarding economic self interests, cutting China off carries huge political risk for Taiwan. You don’t need to bring in world war to see his point.

What I really meant was. Yes, China doesn't have any leading edge foundries. But neither does the USA.

It doesn't need to happen in a day. China has a gigantic spatial advantage here, and as their navy gets stronger and ours doesn't (or, worse, gets cannibalized and weakens), influence shifts. It's a good bet that as this trend continues Taiwan's choices will align more and more with Chinese interests and less and less with US interests.

And again I repeat: if you want to talk about radical changes to global geopolitical balance, you're talking about a rather different subject than "Can China Make a Good CPU?".

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.

It's a small battle in a large war. That doesn't justify being dismissive, especially when there are so many like it.

They don't need to invade Taiwan as you can see by Honk Kong.

Just wait for the Americans to run out of cash to pay for the aircraft carriers around it...

The Chinese govt is pouring huge amounts of resources into training homegrown chip designers. They're doing it based on RISC-V.

China can train chip designers just like Israel does, but they are on a path to end up in Intel's predicament, where they don't have the ability to fabricate competitive chips as their foundries are one to two generations outdated.

I actually occationally worry about them invading Taiwan...

You and several major governments.

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.

> Not a coincidence the US usually has a carrier battle group somewhere between the two.

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 PRC maintains Taiwan is part of their territory and the ROC maintains the mainland is part of theirs.

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.

Why would China need to annex Taiwan when they can simply follow the HK strategy of supporting leaders who are pro-China? Let's face it, if push comes to shove, the US isn't going to do anything except make symbolic statements about Taiwanese sovereignty.

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.

I dunno, HK was legally handed over to China with international approval (albeit with China bending/breaking the 50 year agreement). Messing with Taiwan’s sovereignty would be a far far greater geopolitical problem.

Looking at the stats of countries invaded, China isn't really a major concern

Although SMIC has a rather poor track record, China is continually funding it. Tsinghua Holdings is also funding another foundry as well I cant remember its name. And they have slapped quite a few TSMC / Samsung people to work for them.

Who says China will let anybody else compete?

> The Chinese govt is pouring huge amounts of resources into training homegrown chip designers. They're doing it based on RISC-V.

Frankly both of those statements are true of all major industrial nations.

Name 3 governments that are pumping close to that

UC Berkeley receives hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. Federal government, and some of that is certainly going to the BAR (and they are by far not the only ones). India is outright commissioning the research and design of at least four distinct RISC-V chips (SHAKTI) through IIT Madras. And (although the absolute amounts are smaller, the proportion is not really) many smaller countries through institutions like ETH Zürich are spending a lot of money on microarchitecture and IC design research, most with RISC-V involved.

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?

France and Germany put huge amounts of money into training chip designers? Huh?

Germany is investing 3 billion in deep learning accelerators and all the big automotive companies are investing large amounts aswell. They want to own the supply chain, just as they used to. There are even some army guys sitting in the negotiations (unusual for Germany).

Could you point us to some sources for that? I'm really curious

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-intelligence/germ...

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.

IFX are based in Germany, they employ a lot of people doing such work and definitely have a graduate programme..

What does node mean?

A node is the process a chip is built on. Smaller process = smaller circuits in your chips that use less power/run faster.

Yeah, at least "process" (as in manufacturing process) makes sense as a word, "node" is just pure jargon...

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