TSMC will stop making 7 nm chips for Chinese customers
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Philips at that time also sold off its crown jewels like ASML and ASMI. This was the time when CEOs bragged about restructuring companies with inane statements like "the company should look like a board of asparagus, not like a board of spaghetti". Journalists thought it was brilliant at the time (enjoy your dinner!).
China and Taiwan benefited from this reckless outsourcing. I'm actually in favor of stopping any European or U.S. high tech exports and further outsourcing.
But it should be on an economic level, not on the silly warmongering level.
https://taiwaninsight.org/2024/05/10/a-short-history-of-semi...
Edit: I'm typing this on a Kindle that uses a MediaTek CPU (I don't know if UMC fabbed it).
The scope of mergers & acquisitions in semiconductors is mind boggling & terrifying. It feels like there's so much less diversity, that there's a frailty of entirely Too Big To Fail players left.
Is it good for anyone who wants to manufacture chips in China. Obviously, yes it is good for them. But it is not good, in the short term, for people who want to buy chips in China.
But it might be bad for everyone in China, because someone above implied that they actually don't have the knowledge to make these chips. Not sure how true that is? But assuming it is true, that would hurt everyone in China.
That's the point. You can't effectively sanction china.
> where the tariff is effectively infinite making the amount supplied go to zero
There is a difference between a complete blockade and targeted sanctions.
> this should be even better for the country affected?
One causes a complete collapse of an economy (north korea) while the latter helps a nation build up a sector of an industry (china).
China is the top trading partner of most countries around the world. Even with these sanctions. Go figure. It would be like if china banned exports of 'rare earth minerals' to the US. It would only make the US stronger because we'd just invest in mining rare earth minerals.
What?
Serious interest here. Can anyone else verify that the Chinese don't have the ability to develop and manufacture these chips?
That's stunning. I had no idea that was the case.
Or is this just a, "they don't manufacture computer chips" kind of thing. Which, strategically speaking, is critically different than, "they don't know how".
Actually it might take them less than 10 years to catch up. I was at ICCAD (https://iccad.com) last week and half the papers were from China. And some of the EDA CAD software is under export controls - specifically Gate-all-around technology used in 2nm and below. Right now the big EDA vendors have developers in China who are making the software they're not allowed to sell in THEIR OWN COUNTRY.
China is basically where Japan was in the 1970s and Korea in the 1980s. Only 10 years before they become dominant in the industry.
To top it all off, a lot of this stuff is patented. Not that China cares all that much about Western patents, but violations in this area would make the geopolitical situation even more tense.
"China doesn’t have have that either—the optics (mirrors), the light source, the masks, everything under vacuum" are you really sure about that?
Let me help you here, a lot of this stuff are in Chinese universities. But not commercialized, cuz there is no commercial fly wheel when there are perfectly fine products on the market. Now you just gave $1B dollars to these researchers to bring it to market. This will take time, but this is an engineering, iterate and trial problem, not inventing quantum mechanics. The demand is always there, people who get it get a life time of wealth, what do you think?
Then there’s integration and SW. Not to mention performance, metrology, diagnostics.
Now you have to actually integrate these new tools into a new leading node process. This by itself takes years, assuming you have the tools. China does have existing Immersion process nodes, but still.
Even with unlimited resources, I claim China can’t have EUV within 10 years. Maybe not even 20.
I recall a similar scenario: China can't make reliable transmission powertrain either. Then EV happened.
That being said, even if they would. Under that assumption, I find the idea to further provoke them to doing that morally repulsive. It's an egomaniacal move that disregards Taiwanese people.
They won't be affected personally (unless the country rebels against them) so they can be fine to tank the economy if it gets them closer to some other goal (such as megalomaniac world domination).
"Provoke" means doing something with the intention to trigger an emotional or other reaction. That's not what Taiwan is doing.
It's clear if you pay attention, that China's putting inordinate efforts into other places. Africa is one example. (Probably the principal example.) So they clearly have ambitions that lay outside of Asia.
No one fakes moves like that at that scale. They're serious about what they're doing.
Are questions that answer themselves. But they are the wrong questions.
It’s not China that’s the hostile actor here. It’s not China that’s meddling in distant affairs. This very thread pertains to an unilateral, unprompted hostile action by the US against China. And note that it’s not Trump’s doing. He’ll just do more of it, more openly.
And all of this is very much in line with America’s (at least) seven decades old strategic posture:
It doesn’t. But as the Empire’s grip on the world is slipping it will become more brazen, aggressive, openly selfish, erratic. Quod licet Iovi etc. A role Trump was born to play. But, as Europe’s economic woes after four years of D rule should tell you, it’s not just him who’s happy to cannibalize the Empire’s subjects.
The Beijing regime is already in intense sub-threshold warfare on Taiwan and reiterate their false claim to the country's territory at every opportunity. Denying them access to the finest silicon processes will no doubt trigger more narcissist punishment tantrums delivered through PLA military provocations, or sabotage, or trade attacks, etcetera, but it's hardly going to matter for whether they launch the invasion. They will do that once they've built so many new nukes and cruisers that they like their chances against the total of Taiwan's defense forces plus any other military that could be expected to intervene.
Wondering when we are going to hit the point where our basic every day devices face export controls.
Probably never
There was a time when companies and research labs bought Sony PS2 (and the PS3) to build supercomputer clusters. Japan placed export controls on the PS2 because they had militarily-useful computing power. According to DIA report 4,000 PS2 units had been purchased in the United States and shipped to Iraq in just 2-3 months during 2000.
I can't imagine what general purpose software they'd have wanted to run on a PlayStation 2 from 2000 that they couldn't run on a general purpose laptop in 2004.
But these days, consoles aren't sold below cost, and gigabit network isn't fast enough to make cluster computing make sense
A 64 bit MIPS processor that can run linux + networking for 299$.
I know is not exactly the same but how much was a SGI workstation 20k? 40k? 80k?
If the PS5 had a Nvidia A100 the comparasion would make sense and people would be buying them to create clusters, like they did with the PS2 and 3.
Maybe standard ARM cores are still approved for export to the mainland.