China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD | Hacker News Reader

China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips in Blow to Intel, AMD

wsj.com

83 pointsimpish9208113 comments

Seems like a signal that they see the trade consequences of invading Taiwan, and they're going to put things in motion such that they'll be prepared to be able to handle them.

That’s a hilarious directive since their homegrown CPU is 900 MHz. They are on something like a 30nm die. There is just no way they can transition to those chips in modern devices. This sounds like exactly the sort of order that would come from Xi. He’s living in his information bubble and is excited to go to war.

No, they are not that far behind. You're thinking of Longsoon I guess, but they have a 7nm process at SMIC and Hisilicon designing ARM-based server processors on it[1]. Sure, ARM is western, but guess what, they have the IP anyway, as they required ARM to do business through a subsidiary in China.

China is serious about semiconductors. Hisilicon is competitive in many markets.

[1]https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/huaweis-new-...

It's also a "so what" situation. If China's economy is severed from the rest of the world's, competitors can't take its market share. Being five or even ten years behind on chips is irrelevant when your consumers can't go elsewhere. What did people use their smartphones for ten years ago? Recording themselves and watching cat videos. What do they do now? You don't need 2nm chips to do anything except take market share from the company using 3nm chips. The F-22 Raptor uses an i960 processor from 1988.

yes but AI, simulations and supercomputer warfare

China already has competing AI products that are used domestically.

As if China needs to worry about IP rights anyway.

> Meanwhile, SMIC has increased its current 7 nm production capacity to make more Kirin chips and AI GPUs, said two people familiar with the matter.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/china-close-to-shipp...

They're down to 7nm albeit with low yield and questionable legalities [1].

[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3256321/chinese-c...

> questionable legalities

"Questionable" is an interesting euphemism for massive IP theft over many years.

Doing technology transfers and then crying about it is really bad manners.

If you read Sun Tzu, theft of info is warranted and morally right to do so. Read the spycraft section of Sun Tzu. US did the same with Sputnik. They path and legitimize the act decades ago.

Nope. Loongson is building on 14/12nm nodes and competing on performance with first-gen Ryzen and Coffee Lake. Zhaoxin is still on 16nm AFAIK, but they're matching modern architectures on IPC. CXMT is making LPDDR5 dies in meaningful quantities. Underestimate Chinese industry at your peril, particularly when they've got a blank cheque from the Party.

Do checkout Dxomark which smartphone has best camera. Do checkout how well Kunlun vs Gorrilla best. Do check the number of Mate 60 (hint iPhone sales dropped 20%). And maybe also check the cpu size. They have already rumours seeing actual 2-3nm in used in Huawei engineering sample unit. Even AI GPUs ES sample now floating if you have connections to get it (definitely better than Intel Arcs). I think you truly live in Joe info bubble. I have friends directly in Chinese semicon. You will see 4-5 years down the road, TSMC become irrelevant. Did you know now 90% worldwide mid tier and low tier chip dominated by Chinese made? Used to be TI and EU foundry during Obama time. You can do the research. Helps a lot if you are strong in read Chinese simplified characters sources.

China is old [1] and broke [2]. It won't be able to afford to attack Taiwan - for reference, 1930s Japan and Germany had way more young people. Japan was also rich from its empire, while Germany transitioned away from gold standard to afford its wars. 2022 Russia thought the war would end in 3 days.

Also, as we see from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, drones and missiles are effective at taking out the world's second largest navy. Taiwan has very accurate and effective homegrown missiles [3]. China would need to amass a ton of ships which would be easily detected, staff them with only sons from families, and try to move them across a 100 mile straits while under the barrage of US/Japan/Taiwan missiles and drones.

Lastly, China is quickly transitioning to state run economy much like Soviet Union [3], which means innovations and growth will be gone forever, especially in tech industries.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

[2] https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/international/global/frugal... https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/325...

[3] https://www.eurasiantimes.com/taiwan-smashes-chinese-warship...

[4] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-s-favored-sta...

There's no way they invade Taiwan in a controlled manner, it's too easy to sink a navy over that distance. Sure they could do a long range bombardment but then there's nothing left to take.

Sure they could do a long range bombardment but then there's nothing left to take.

This is irrelevant. Not because you're wrong, but because you're thinking of terms of what a rational, reasonable person would do. Taking Taiwan has about as much to do with helping China as the Iraq War had to do with avenging 9/11: nothing whatsoever. If China attacks Taiwan it will be for the sole reason that Xi Jinping has and is using it as a political tool to amass power. For that purpose it doesn't matter if Taiwan is a smoking crater by the end.

Taking Taiwan would be useful as a naval base. And to deny the US the ability to blockade the pacific ocean.

Seriously. There's a reason US has military bases on islands down the whole east coast of China.

Taiwan is the only thing essentially protecting Japan.

Are you an expert on naval warfare?

It seems like an obvious response to sanctions and denying access to lithography equipment. Let's return back to the reality where China isn't presently invading Taiwan, but is a target of containment attempts.

It's hard to blame them. Running vital infrastructure on domestic tech seems a sound strategic move.

I really just hope consumers will have access to both sides.

I know people freak out about hardware backdoors but some of the cheap tech coming out of China sure is cool

That won't be that cheap for long though (and I don't see that as a bad thing either)

Looking at Huawei or Xiaomi goods, the quality is there and the prices are also getting noticeably higher accordingly.

Agreed though the availability of both would keep prices low by virtue of competition

They won't, for the same reason the USSR didn't. The people making these chinese goods are part of the government. They're also part of a government that will literally kill them if they're not the best at everything, and of course they will fuck up some bits. So they will outlaw access to foreign technology, to hide how they're "embarassing the Chinese state".

Because totalitarian ideologies ... they can't fix reality, but they can certainly fix the appearance of reality and make the people judging THEM only observe a fixed reality.

Plus this is something that "infects" everything. If there is ONE western thing the CCP wants to hide from Chinese, they'll have to cut access to a LOT of western products just to hide a few small things they really don't want to get out (better ballpoint pens in the west perhaps?). It's funny how this starts too. Like in the USSR, in China when it started it was more-or-less positive. They outlawed better products and celebrated chinese industry catching up. Needless to say, they're a government. The focus has shifted to just outlawing better products, and now they're really more often destroying people who help chinese industry catch up, because ... that does the absolute #1 forbidden thing: it gives the wrong politicians a leg up over others. It gives, to be exact, random politicians a leg up over others ... which of course quickly gets a wrong one.

Hopefully it'll only mean Chinese people never see western products, unless specific products the party wants them to use. Hopefully we'll retain access to Chinese goods.

Though of course, it'll rapidly become INCREDIBLY rewarding for anyone with a great idea to run to the west. In the west, you'll get a great job at the very least. Idea great enough? You get to be rich. You stay in China with a great idea? You get killed ...

That is what the West tells itself and God I wish that was true.

I don't quite share your pessimism.

Two choice seem preferable over 1 choice even if the one is subject to state interference. (and lets be real here US side interferes a lot too - see sanctions & restrictions).

>hide how they're "embarassing the Chinese state".

You assume there will be something to be embarassed about. Given current trajectory I'm more concerned about the opposite. Western side getting left in the dust in say a decade.

It seems strange to label Intel + AMD + Qualcomm + ARM + TI + NVIDIA + Samsung + Fujitsu + etc as "1 choice".

Even on the Chinese side I assume it's more than just SMIC (or whatever the big one is over there).

I meant in the context of ecosystems. A bit like Android vs iPhone even if there are lots of different android devices.

In the long run I expect the two will diverge - whether its by standards, architecture or compatibility.

Spoken like someone with no clue about China apart from social media. Talk to any Chinese entrepreneur and you'll know the competition is much more strong and ruthless than in West. Even for capital intensive high tech industries like EV and mobile you'll find more companies than rest of world put together.

Well, I've talked to two important Chinese officials (important enough to be in the "Hall of the People", but nobody you would know), and both were of this opinion. The CCP tolerates ZERO mistakes from it's officials. Merely not making any mistakes is not enough, it's just table stakes. Like passing the exam.

One can certainly hope that!

The cheap tech (the cool stuff at least) is massively subsidized by the CCP which is attempting to enter the market. Normal strategy but it will not and can not last.

People “freak out” for good reason.

People need to understand just how insidious the communist party’s methods are.

Do you have any idea about the US's methods? You may want to pick up a history book to see how insidious the American methods are.

This doesn't make the CCP's methods any less insidious.

Sure, if you compare a pickpocket with a rapist, the pickpocket is still bad.

Yeah, lets make sure the cheap gadgets made under a socio-political system we consider abusive keep coming.

At this point there is no alternative. We need their production capacity so the wheels back home can keep on spinning.

I know you are speaking the truth, at present, but that doesn't mean it is healthy, or that we must accept it as the inevitable future.

It seems that AMD and Intel are continuing to lose market share between China restrictions and cloud providers designing their own silicon. At some point, you will have a Boeing/Mc Donald Douglas situation where the US government will force AMD to acquire Intel so that both entities can survive.

In a surprise to no one. This is just tit for tat in the Trump-Biden trade war with China.

China initiated the "trade war" years before any American politician acknowledged it.

Agree. You'd have to be a bit stupid not to see the early embrace of China was to collect, learn, and participate with the west to only later excise control then exceed and dominate. Here i want to chastise us (the west) for our money, money, money focus and quarter to quarter focus.

China, and I think somewhat to their credit, learned tons from the stupidity of Russians and were never going to be so thoroughly broken. And it's understandable; that's what we'd do. Nonetheless, China isn't so powerful as to dictate terms.

It seems like China's risk calculation was suffer short term money loss and foreign products and services now, to make own and control the market access and structure later making back the money.

>>This is just tit for tat in the Trump-Biden trade war with China

Or maybe something more strategic as they ramp up hostilities With Taiwan.

China is fine with the status quo, who isn't fine with that is the US.

Exactly. The West dictated these same sourcing rules to their critical infrastructure providers years ago.

It's time for the West to wake up and stop nurturing authoritarian regimes.

You are right, banning foreign equipment in your telecoms are the sign of authoritarian regimes.

2020: Telecoms providers must stop installing Huawei equipment in the UK's 5G mobile network from September, the government has said. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55124236

Protectionism isn't what's being referred to as authoritarianism.

"You are right, banning foreign equipment in your telecoms are the sign of authoritarian regimes"

That's distorted, wrong, and frankly a bit of whining

Well, except one country every other is using it?

One country with 1400 million people

What are they going to use? RISC-V?

That and LoongArch and home-grown Arm chips most likely.

Zhaoxin have got an x86 ISA license and a respectable microarchitecture implementation.

I don't have access behind the paywall. But from the title, if it is only telecom carriers devices, basically RISC-V and ARM chips.

Telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE use their own network processor on data plane for a long time, replacing control plane CPU (usually x86 or ARM) is not a big task. Smaller companies who relies on Broadcom solution may have a tough time, but 3 years to find a replacement and finish adaptation is not that hard too.

Big Chinese carriers like China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom rely on networking gear from Cisco, Nokia, Ericcson etc alongside Huawei, just like European/US carriers do/used to. All those vendors are going to feel losing this market.

Personally, I think 3 years to change the hardware at the heart of your product is a huge ask. Although of course it depends on the quality of the replacement.

I think you’re underestimating the CPUs in such telco devices. Even datacenter grade equipment (much easier on the control plane than telco or backbone) come with Xeon chips. Not the best ones, but still full blown server CPUs with heaps of RAM.

This is not Arm or risc-v territory (yet), perhaps Ampere devices. However this is approachable by Loongsoon an I’d bet it’s the path they’ll take.

I've always understood it that datacentre equipment comes with beefier control plane processors then telco equipment. And that's for three main reasons. Firstly, the data planes themselves are less powerful and have to offload more to the CPU. Secondly, the thermal env of telco will cook a Xeon. Thirdly, SDN and extensible Linux-based software is more popular in datacente, compared to mostly proprietary telco software where the CPU has a fixed house-keeping role. Cavium's arm/mips processors were popular for telco control plane.

It's quite possible my viewpoint is outdated.

Yes, already are.

Artificially restricting yourself to inferior silicon is a great way to boost your economy. /s

RockChip's ARM SoC's are quite fast actually. I run a couple of OrangePi 5Bs which work quite nicely.

Mind you these are 4+4 bigLITTLE systems with 35 degrees C idle without any tuning and passive cooling. Huawei is also quite improved on hardware reliability and design department in the last years, so there's no need for concern for them.

They still need a Infiniband equivalent network layer for HPC, though.

I think the poster above was referring to the node size, to which China will not have access because TSMC & Samsung prefer to sell to the West.

Their media capabilities are quite meh however

Let’s take a look:

    RK3588S:
    - 8K60P output over HDMI 2.1
    - OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.2, Vulkan 1.2
    - 6 TOPS AI accelerator with INT4/8/16 support
    - Real time H265/H264 encoding up to 8K30P, parallel encoding with less resolution, plus decodes tons of format up to 8K, plus JPEG decoder.

Details are at https://www.cnx-software.com/pdf/Rockchip%C2%A0RK3588%C2%A0D...

China's economy seems to be doing just fine

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/04/10/chinas-unf...

This week's cover of The Economist: https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2024/04/04/thi...

> This week we had one worldwide cover. China’s famously industrious workforce is shrinking, its property boom has ended and the system of free trade that helped it grow rich is disintegrating.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/04/04/xi-jinpings-mis...

My reply was in the context of the parent comment.

> China’s famously industrious workforce is shrinking, its property boom has ended and the system of free trade that helped it grow rich is disintegrating.

Unsurprising, using capitalist interpretations of what's "good" and "bad" as reported by capitalist media, but those are increasingly ridiculous things to value in a human sense, particularly with the rise of complex automation and who should benefit from it.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/03/08/chinas-nex...

Good thing The Economist is so reliable in its reporting about China.

FWIW, my limited anecdotal evidence is that they're going through a rough patch. Friends with family in China report that they are very much in a recession. And every Chinese factory we know (copper wire) is building factories in other SE Asian countries (Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia) so they can be tariff-free for American customers. Which I take as a sign that the tariffs have been painful for them.

See related reply

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015029

You're mistaken. Huawei's Kirin Silicon was ahead of what the likes of Qualcomm offered, right before they were banned from TSMC by the US.

It was a damn shame too, right when Qualcomm was getting some needed competition, the US ban happened. Convenient for Qualcomm but a huge blow to consumers.

Kirin wasn't ahead, they were "just" head to head with Qualcomm. But that's not very hard if you use generic ARM design and can pay for the BEST TSMC node.

Producing good/great ARM SoCs is simply a function of producing in TSMC. The reason why Google abd Samsung SoCs are mediocre is that they produce them in Samsung fabs.

You're also mistaken. Qualcomm rarely used "generic" cores. Just like Apple, they had their own custom designs(Kryo) based on the generic specs(Cortex), which were instruction compatible but more efficient, that being one of the reason why they were ahead of the competition using generic ARM cores on TSMC, like MediaTek.

I was talking about Kirin who did use the generic cores. Qualcomm had at times their customized cores closer or farther from the generic design, with mixed success.

They are pouring lots of effort into their own EUV lithography tools. Given the complexity of the ASML approach, I bet China will have the best (cheapest at leading nodes) litho tools on earth in 15 years. They'll also have world class designs based on RISC-V. They are playing a long game.

This is nonsense and assumes the Chinese are just better than everyone else and will 'win in the end'.

The real issue is that China is an oppressive totalitarian state and that's counterproductive to the innovation and creativity that is actually needed to compete and succeed.

China will obviously do well in some areas it has a natural advantage in, we've already seen those, meanwhile it'll go backwards overall. Not because it can't catch up, but because the game will change in ways it can't foresee or understand.

In the short term, it's a disaster.

Long term though, this enables them to flood the world with previous-gen chips at 1/4th the price.

Oh, and invade Taiwan.

It makes sense if you assume they are planning to invade Taiwan by about 2027 like some foreign policy and military people are saying. That's supposed to be the year at which they're at maximum relative military strength after which they'll decline relative to the US.

As does their massive investments in renewables and nuclear, they need to get off imported natural gas if they're going to invade since natural gas imports from middle east will be blockaded.

What use are chip factories in the United States when you cannot sell them to the largest market of chips that only will become even more larger as Chinese middle class and their consumption grows?

The point is to have a domestic supply chain independent of other nations. It’s becoming vital for security purposes.

By this way of thinking everything is vital for "security purposes" and you end up with a full autarchy. Food is vital because you can't rely on others to feed your population. And so is energy. And so on. What is really going on though is that the US started a trade war with China and it's just another salvo in this war. Soon the US will declare electric cars from China as a "threat" and ban them, too. Probably the Chinese will retaliate with banning Teslas. On the same grounds, too.

Are you suggesting a country should be reliant on other countries for food?

? Yes, food and energy are vital to national security, that's why we have stuff like farming subsides. But that's not the only thing that goes into an economy. No one cares that China dominated in polyester production. It makes total sense to guard certain key industries.

...What? There is a spectrum of importance to national security, food and energy are very much on the side of more important, so not sure why you chose those as an example. It's extremely reductive to say any country that imposes limits on trade for its own strategic benefit is an autocracy.

Autarky, not autocracy. It’s an economic goal of having an economy that can continue to operate fairly well even if foreign trade is restricted. It’s associated (perhaps not exclusively) with fascist movements, which emphasized national independence from the broader world.

(I don’t agree that hedging against potential action by a single major strategic adversary is a strong move toward autarky, however—if, say, Canada had tons of fabs instead of the precariously-perched Taiwan, I bet we’d not be spending so much money on them)

Not having your country days away from starving if international shipping were disrupted isn't fascism, it's just common sense. Every country that can practically manage to have sufficient domestic food production will do so.

Yeah, of course. I was just correcting the autocracy/autarky mix-up.

Japan and Germany both ran out of energy in WW2.

Energy sovereignty is a good reason Europe needs to be getting off fossil fuels ASAP.

Banning Teslas sounds like a good idea. Maybe the US should consider leading on that one.

You have some points re trade war, that is definitely a thing that is going on.

However, the on-shoring of chip production is especially for military strategic purposes. Right now a majority of chip fabs are all in Taiwan, and within striking range of a country that likes to rattle its sabers. Losing Taiwan's fabs would be a problem wrt military supply.

Onshoring is mostly happening because the disruption due to factory/port COVID lockdowns in China, and then all the issues with ports and canals domestically, made it quite clear that the long distance transpacific supply chain cannot be the only option. At least with Mexico and Canada there are dozens of land crossings that can be diverted to. And if you cannot sell for six months due to supply issues but your competitor can you may as well be a sitting duck.

IMO onshoring is mostly happening at this point because of tariffs. The supply chain crisis is over and has been for a while at this point, but everything coming from China is still 25% more expensive than it used to be.

over =/= could never happen again. and it doesn't even have to be the exact same scenario.

right now the panama is at lower capacity due to droughts and the red sea leading to the suez is a conflict zone.

Yeah, but the problem is that your competitors dictate what you have to do. If they keep their supply chain in Asia because it gives them a significant price advantage, then you're overpriced. For on-shoring to work, you need to be able to survive such a structural disadvantage in the short-term AND the advantage you realize when outlier events happen has to outweigh the structural disadvantage.

Or at least within your sphere of influence, e.g Mexico.

The other 7 billion people in the world

The theory is that the Chinese middle class has already peaked given the population decline, economic woes, and shrinking growth of exports to the West.

As but one signal, the recent dumping of Chinese EVs has less to do with industrial superiority and more to do with their own shrinking domestic demand. The Chinese market is saturated and consumer demand has slowed.

India's growth is predicted to top China's before 2030, and manufacturing is moving on to cheaper cost of labor economies. Mexico, India, Vietnam. Africa won't be far behind.

There are plenty of other markets for American tech.

China is in a weird place that is hard to predict. They have some troubling economic and demographic problems as you said, but also have built up strong tech and manufacturing capabilities. We could easily see China continue to grow in power, even if the middle class continues to be poor.

China also has large swaths of it's population still in a lower income bracket, especially the further you get from the coasts (though the demographics there are not much better). It's going to be very interesting to see what happens over the next few decades (and by interesting I hope in not a terrible way).

One of the theories of China's recent, intense sabre rattling is that demographically they'll be in no position to militarily take Taiwan in 20 years. So it's now/soon or never.

*its population

China will be able to easily field ten million soldiers in 20 years. Their military keeps strenghtening. Their demography woes will cause economic and social problems first, not military ones.

I believe this supposed rush to take Taiwan is more about Xi's personal ambitions rather than strategic pressure.

Seems like they are doing OK on the percentage of people who own their homes front:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...

Home ownership is a meme. Congratulations, you're sitting next to other prosperous countries like Cuba.

There was a recent bloomberg article titled (from memory):

the fed has a problem. There are two US economies but only one rate.

The 95 v 5% split in the US with the middle class worse and worse is a problem. It'll be the same for China except that Chinese politicians are way more attuned to social cohesion compared to the west.

Also they're not really "dumping" EV's in Western markets. The automotive market traditionally made low margins like 5%, until EV's where they're now trying to make closer to 30%. They're just sticking to the old pricing model.

Western manufacturers have been caught with their pants down, they operated under the assumption car ownership would become a premium thing, like owning an iPhone. Basically thought they'd have a free lunch fleecing consumers.

Making money is not the primary object.

Currently chips for civilian and military applications often come out of Taiwan.

The strategic and political situation of Taiwan is -fluid. Losing these fabs would be a heavy blow to the west both economically and more importantly qua military defense.

Thus extra fabs in other (western) countries are pro-indicated for this reason alone. It's insurance.

Losing Taiwan fabs would have only minimal military impact. Military hardware uses older computing tech, built on larger nodes (its development takes many years / decades). It's also relatively low volume and military can outbid almost any other customer.

I believe the importance of Taiwanese fabs is very overstated. Taiwan is mainly a (geo) political matter.

thats how chinese monster has been created

What's the point of making anything if you can't sell it in China???

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