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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

10 years is probably an underestimate given then current geopolitical condition.

Just last year people were commenting here on HN that China is years away from making anything under 14nm and that even that would be hard for them. Then we heard about China being years away from hypersonic missiles and how they couldn't even make fast memory chips.

Then we were surprised not only have been making 7nm chips for a year already, they also make the fastest memory chips. Our response? Let's sanction them so they can't sell those memory chips.

Instead of believing in the fairy tale that we can somehow block the country with the highest number of STEM graduates out of technology, maybe what we ought to be doing is to invest a little less in the bullshit professions and a bit more in the hard tech, not just here but also in places like Japan where they had the potential to compete with ASML but dropped out because it wasn't profitable enough more than a decade ago.

>Just last year people were commenting here on HN that China is years away from making anything under 14nm and that even that would be hard for them.

Forget about the topic of China for a bit, 99.999% of HN comments on anything hardware are pretty much worthless. To the point I question how did software developers get so abstracted that they had little to zero basic understanding of hardware. When they should be considered in the same field.

If it is wasn't for the 0.00000001% of rare comments for those who actually work inside Intel, AMD, Lattice and ASML ( or some other SemiConductor Companies ) I would have skipped hardware topics on HN.

Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier.

The difference is that China didn't get the latest and greatest machines. Taiwan did, but not China.

But ASML definitely had sales people in China that were willing to do whatever it took to make the sale. Including giving hundreds of gigabytes of free pirate DVD rips to their prospective customers. Guess how long that took over the 2Mbps E-1 lines that the local offices in China had to get back to the HQ offices in Eindhoven, where those could then get out onto the public Internet? Guess who helped run that central mail system that was frequently flooded by all these DVD rips that were being sent by the sales people to their customers?

>> Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier.

Why would you make such an absurd comment about ASML's 2006 sales? or perhaps you mean to say 2016?

  2006
  Korea 1,085,497 13,730 662
  United States 931,971 740,036 24,262
  Taiwan 739,432 16,058 483
  Rest of Asia 470,915 937,107 1,282
  Europe 369,289 2,145,710 166,415
  Total 3,597,104 3,852,641 193,10

  2016
  Taiwan 2,140.3 2,815.9
  Korea 1,594.3 28.7
  United States 1,087.5 4,200.6
  China 758.2 2.6
  Singapore 245.6 0.8
  Japan 415.1 4.6
  Rest of Asia 26.7 2.8
  Netherlands 1.1 2,737.9
  EMEA 606.3 2.5

China's share in chips was a paltry low-single figure until few years ago -- less than 5% of global chip sales, according to SIA's report in 2022, and that also had a lot to do with foreign chip makers (eg, Samsung's Xi'an plant which opened in 2019 accounts for 40% of their entire DRAM production).

I know where the sales reps were, and where the customers were that they were selling to. Maybe those sales were to companies that weren't technically Chinese, even though they were operating in China. And so maybe the sales got reported for some other region.

China was huge business back then before 2006. Kept our E-1 lines quite flooded with all those pirated DVD images that they were sending by e-mail. But we did fix that problem. And I did get a nice little invited talk out of the work I did on their e-mail system.

And yes, I said 2006 and I meant 2006.

If you properly sanction China it would be very difficult for them to make anything 28nm+. A lot of stuffs have to be imported from foreign countries so if US can convince JP/SK/EU to join the sanction it would be tough time for China.

Making hypersonic missiles or any military equipment is a different story as:

- You don't have to care about quality. You can make 100 chips, fail 90 and still have 10 to use, which is OK for military but would be a disaster for civilian;

- Worst case you can use espionage or diplomatic channels to find a small number of chips. You can't do that with mass market products.

I think you're comparing prototype low volume/yield production to 1000s of wafers per month at >90% yield. Those aren't comparable.

Intel could do 7nm (they called it 10) with DUV immersion equipment and double/quad patterning, but the yield was low 90s even for their highly tuned processes. That's why EUV is so important.

Don't believe all the "news" hype, it's just agit-prop entertainment.

Underestimate? Unless Washington aggressively nukes mainland China, recent overperformance by a post-Zero-COVID China suggests 10y is an overestimate.

Existential stress is an excellent motivator for rapid innovation. Or did we learn nothing from the 20th century?

> overperformance

What do you mean?

Growth, high tech innovation, etc.

China has been on the verge of collapse since 1991, according to Western popular consciousness.

There is no need for exaggeration. But.. Well clearly the last couple of years were not great for China compared to 10 or so prior to covid.

Based on which facts?

Slowing economic growth?

Extreme lockdowns?

Rapidly aging population in large part because of idiotic lunacy that was the one child policy?

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