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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com