China has a chip to fry with y'all: Wants its own chip smarts and fabs China is making more moves as it tries to set up an indigenous and patent-protected semi-conductor chip capability. Xu Jinghong, the chairman of Tsinghua Holdings, said in a Davos World Economic Forum interview that Tsinghua wanted to buy two semi-conductor manufacturing companies. Analyst haus Stifel Nicolaus' MD Aaron …
It's more than that. When I worked (worked? it was FUN!) as a technical marketing manager for a major semiconductor company, my customers were all the major technology manufacturers in the USA and Europe. I knew their corporate roadmaps for the next three years, their product plans, the inner workings of all their stuff.
Do you want China to know what's in Ford's cars for the next three years, or the inner workings of Cisco's next generation routers, or the hardware and software inside Boeing's newest aircraft before it's released? Semiconductor companies know all these things. They know the real technology future. Do we want the Chinese government to have this information?
Those nice people in Derby have , like everybody else in that business, been using the mil-spec variants of tried and tested stuff like Z8002 (RIP) and 68xxx. Apparently they've also been using a home brewed simple MIPS-alike for a decade or two. I'm not personally aware of any engine controllers that ran on Z80, but in that era there were actually some PDP8-based systems (well, specifically, the Intersil/Harris 6100).
More recently RR's control system people appear to have developed an unusual cacheless RISC follow-on to their MIPSalike, which now includes features like speculative execution, branch prediction, etc (in a low production volume safety critical system), complete with its own flavor of gcc. Does RR's new top man (Warren East, ex top man at ARM) know of this development (which predates his arrival), or understand why it is supposed to make engineering sense in comparison with (say) a tried and tested licenced processor derivative in a hardened ASIC?
Oh please. China knows what color underwear you put on this morning, and they got the info from the NSA. They have spies in every major industry - many who don't even know they're spies. They already have this information you are afraid they are going to get, and in many cases their people were involved in making it.
Nope ... If either party undergoes a "change of control" then the other party keeps the rights.It was a clause put in the agreement to prevent "Sugar Daddies" muscling in.
That's not what I saw reported but even if true I'd be very surprised if Intel didn't negotiate a new deal with AMD's new owners. If Intel ever becomes the sole producer of x86 chips they'll be at serious risk of the wrath of various competition watchdogs.
Well, if that's true then it effectively prevents people from buying AMD. Since buying AMD (or somebody investing a huge amount of money in it) is about the only way that anybody is ever going to seriously threaten Intel's on the desktop/server processor front again it's a nice cheap way of ensuring a dominant market position for Intel.
So, do I wait a few months for the current chip players to drop their prices to make the whole deal look slightly unpalatable, or wait until China ramps up a glut. making a bucket of Cornish sand more expensive than a bucket of Chinese nand?
I'm looking forward to the day I can replace my 3KW electric heater with the equivalent BTU output in DRAM for about the same price.
Everyone loves to talk about US government corporate welfare, but China kind of takes it to a new level. We'll see how long it takes to go from "we want a chip fab and semiconductor manufacturer" to "People's Semiconductor buys Intel _and_ AMD on same day in $10 trillion mega-merger!" That would get around that "change of control" clause in AMD's x86 license.
The big difference seems to be that Chinese industry is much more aligned with state policy, which makes sense in their system. From an outsider looking in, it's pretty amazing how quickly resources are diverted to projects deemed critical. Very different from the US federal government being unable to channel highway refurbishment funds to avoid the occasional collapsing bridge...
The Top500 supercomputer list is something of a superpower penis measuring stick. China took the top spot three years ago with their Tianhe-2 based on Intel Phi coprocessors and has held it since as they build it out. The US has the fewest supers on the list than it has had since the list was started in 1993. Tianhe-2 is nearly twice as powerful as the second best, Titan at a US DOE site, and China is still building it out. China has more supers on the list than ever before.
So of course the US banned Intel from exporting the Xeon Phi coprocessors to China. And of course China responded by starting to work around the restriction.
The big difference seems to be that Chinese industry is much more aligned with state policy, which makes sense in their system.
Isn't working out so well for Chinese heavy industry and infrastructure, is it? State bureaucrats picking winners is a recipe for failure, and has been wherever it has been tried, and we're just entering the unravelling phase of China's infrastructure growth plans, where they find that there's no happy ending when you have manufacturing capacity at least double the reliable world demand for coal, cement, steel, shipbuilding, or construction work, all funded by debt they will never repay.
Semiconductors sound a lovely growth idea, but sadly they aren't manpower intensive, nor will they demand the sort of skills of (for example) the 100,000 workers laid off by Longmay Group (a large Chinese coal mining conglomerate) late last year. So seeking to build some national champions in semi fabrication isn't that clever - capital intensive, high risk, low job count, all in a cyclical industry with high fixed costs. It'll play out like the other commodity industries that the party has allowed to build up.
Just as the Soviet Union was bankrupted by economic sclerosis and excessive state directed spending (largely on the military), China is at risk of doing the same, except that the state spending is on state-directed "capitalism".
"Just as the Soviet Union was bankrupted by economic sclerosis and excessive state directed spending (largely on the military), China is at risk of doing the same, except that the state spending is on state-directed "capitalism"."
I was all set to contradict your post initally, but this is a very intriguing thesis. (For the potential irony alone... but yes, you might be on to something.)
Anyone here with a solid enough footing in economics to weigh in competently?
(Please - no trolling, no timewasters.)
China isin't just building throwing money at a single area though. They are investing in an entire set of industries that eliminates their dependence on the west. FFS- they are selling Britain nuclear reactors because the country that designed the first civil nuclear power plant no longer has the skills to build them!
When it comes to processors, whilst their in house processors probably aren't going to wipe intel and AMD out in terms of performance they don't really need to. Achieve 20% of the performance of an intel/AMD chip and you can do everything but gaming.
China can already produce things faster than that, and given their internal market is a about 20% of humanity then they clearly have a "good enough" product for people who can't afford wintel which is large enough to be economically viable even if they don't export. Externally, a cheap but effective PC would also appear to have markets in India, and probably also Africa. This ignoring the devices that China sells to us that has to contain processors even if they aren't PC's.
No, I would say that China is at no immediate risk of bankrupting themselves by state directed spending. Most of their spending has a economic return on investment. Compare this to US Government spending. The potential ROI on having the largest military on the planet (spending more than the next ten largest militaries- many of whom are allies) is quite low in comparison. Which is more likely to go bust?
It's not China.
What's the state of play with dual-use export control rules these days? Are China permitted to buy these things?
More specifically, who makes the critical bits of the chip production process (steppers and such?) and whose export control rules apply?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper
The value is in learning how to operate a fab and tweak performance and get the next generation working. There is no value in simply buying an offshore fab - you might as well just contract TMSC to make chips for you.
The reason Intel are so far ahead is that they have the hands on production engineers to make the thing work.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
