See, this was always the problem with Chinese efforts to indigenize their semiconductor industry. Each individual Chinese firm had no incentive to use Chinese suppliers, rather than their more established Western competitors. Well, guess what, the US Government has solved that coordination problem for them. Just about every Chinese company, up and down the supply chain, now has an excellent reason to buy Chinese. Sure, they'll take years to work out the kinks, and there will be lots of chances to point and laugh in the meantime. But in the long run, the Sullivan-Blinken strategy of squeezing the Chinese chip industry might end up being one of the most counterproductive geostrategic ideas of all time.
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
177 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
60105 readers
1954 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The financial support is there so I think it's a matter of time for local manufacturing to catch up. It's happened in pretty much every area they've been in. Restricting chip imports puts higher pressure on iterating faster towards homegrown capabilities.
It would be interesting to see whether China will undercut ASML on the world market once they have competitive EUV, or wherever they'll keep it for themselves.
And given the speed at which China generally is able to carry things out, I don't think it will take long at all until we see true parity between Chinese chips and their US-based counterparts.
It's easy when you can put expendable minions to work 25/7 on things.
That's not how research and development works.
That is how it works, infinite budget and student resources
And it's even faster if you peek at others' homework..
This is especially interesting in the wake of the Chinese Government's new ban on AMD and Intel chips in government computers.
Ban so they have justification for confiscation. It's not a real 'ban'. Like how russian missiles 'aren't' made with western components but actually are.
Well, you have to dogfood it sometime...
Well the requirements for government IT stack is really more about security and reliability than performance.
They just banned them and Nvidia for medium sized businesses, too.
That's very important context that I wasn't aware of. Makes the other comment about it being used as an avenue to search/seize that hardware much more believable.
This is exactly why they want Taiwan. They can make chips, just not the greatest ones. Taiwan literally helped invent the most advanced way of growing platters around.
I was under the impression that most chips don't need to be high end - just something good enough for the thing to work. Unless these have very high failure rates or catch on fire they should be fine, right?
For Chinas purposes ( war ) they want the best ones. You need these good chips to have missiles that can at least match your opponent. China wants to make AI powered ship killing missiles and they can't really make them without these chip making facilities.
For the vast majority of military applications, including missiles, you do not want to use bleeding edge chip tech. You use 50nm or higher, anything with smaller feature sizes is not robust enough for a military environment.
why is that?
Missiles, radar, ai, communications, R&D. The list of reasons why your wrong writes itself.
These chips are in everything too. Electric vehicles need them, factories and businesses want them.
The chinese understand that this is a matter of national security, as can be seen by the US limiting their access to high quality chips. This power over other nations production shouldn't be there.
I hope they catch up. I personally probably wouldn’t ever buy a Chinese chip, but it’d be nice if nvidia, AMD, and Intel had some real competition.
Edit: weirdly contentious. I just want 1080ti pricing back
Yeah the main thing about Chinese's companies dependency of Western chips is that it's another venue for putting political pressure to avoid conflicts in the area. Once the Chinese don't need anymore Western chips, they can safely ignore some type of embargoes.
Well that’s not good for me. Hopefully some European company can compete then.