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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention a military takeover of Hong Kong would generate valuable data and experience that could be usefully applied to an invasion of Taiwan.

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I'm not sure how applicable it would be. Taiwan does have a military that would resist and Hong Kong doesn't.

HK also doesn't have TSMC, which if destroyed would put semiconductor progress and prices back 5-10 years.

It's too bad TSMC didn't open a second factory in HK.

In another 10 to 20 years that won't matter with Moore's law slowing down. Globally competitive foundaries are one of the CCP's goals, and the same slow down that let TSMC surpase Intel will let some Chinese foundary surpass or equal TSMC. Their competitive edge is going to erode away to commodification (albeit for those who can stomach.the huge capital investment).

TSMC has never been very competitive with Intel. Intel has long been a leader in semiconductor manufacturing, but they almost exclusively used it for making their own chips; they weren't a contract fab. TSMC, on the other hand, has always been a contract manufacturer.

Recently the story has been TSMC is pulling ahead of intel in process nodes and intel has been missing deadlines, but this inversion has only happened in the last few years.

So following that logic Intel's fab has no competitors. : /

Basically, no, it doesn't (unless something has changed a lot since I worked there; I haven't kept up very much since then). Intel designs and makes their own chips, so they don't want or need a contract manufacturer.

This is like saying Ford's factories have no competitors, and that's true too. Ford isn't going to farm out their car manufacturing to some other company. (I mean the final assembly; of course carmakers routinely get various components from suppliers, such as airbags, infotainment computers, seats, etc.)

Chipmaking is a little weird because, unlike carmaking where the automakers all own and operate their own final-assembly factories, or aircraft makers like Boeing which own their own factories, chipmakers are frequently "fabless" these days and do the design work but partner with a fab like TSMC to actually make the chips. Intel is an exception and doesn't do this.

Just because they're vertically integrated doesn't mean they don't have competition, just that it's difficult to judge one half of the business on its own.

Intel's own messaging in this regard refers to the competition.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/sunit-rikhi-...

Ok, that's about Intel's "custom fab" business, which would indeed compete with TSMC. When I was there, that didn't exist AFAIK, they just made their own chips, so I wasn't aware of this (as I said, I haven't kept up much with that company since I left).

Valuable data about the public and international outcry and response- they already have all the war games simulated out.

Aah, crap, good point. And Trump will probably not do anything in both cases. Putin neither, and the EU can't go in themselves.

EU wouldn't be rearing to go in either.

Uh, if the EU wanted to, it could absolutely go in. The UK has the most valid reason for intervening since it's their treaty that's being violated by a Chinese invasion. EU countries have 2+ million military personnel combined, hundreds of naval assets, thousands of aircraft, strong mutual defense military alliances, etc.

Europe couldn’t even handle Libya without running out of bombs. They have no capability to do anything of note.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nato-runs-short-on-some...

> Libya “has not been a very big war. If [the Europeans] would run out of these munitions this early in such a small operation, you have to wonder what kind of war they were planning on fighting,”

Europe has no army or military capacity. You have UK/France with some military capability but rest of Europe has in essence no armed forces, their tiny militaries are mostly only used to help during natural disasters or with humanitarian efforts. Europe can't even handle issues in its own backyard without US.

Except the UK has appointed a child as their PM and is at the moment throwing a "we're not doing any cooperation!" tantrum.

China could just dangle the promise of a post-Brexit trade deal (the Brexiters need anything to look good, they were ready to brag about deals with S. Arabia and Turkey).

As someone has mentioned, imagine if Le Pen wins in France, the UN Security Council would be run by Xi, Putin, Trump, BoJo and Le Pen...

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