Chinese semiconductor industry

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BlackWindMnt

Captain
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pakje said:
but it's still open source. Just look at how linux is still present in russia, sure some providers have stopped services but that's not the same as a ban
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Open source stuff will be hard to ban, but just like in the financial sector in this post Ukrainian world a lot of nononos has been crossed.

The scenario i'm thinking of is that financially eastern big tech like Huawei won't be able to sponsor their board chair anymore. Like the saying goes "If You Are Not at the Table Then You’re Probably on the Menu" western big tech are able to sponsor their board chair so they can influence Linux development to advance western tech or slow down eastern tech etc.

Western big tech might assign pro western top maintainers and code reviewers to get their stuff in first etc in the "official" version of linux. Sure its possible for Huawei to maintain, compile and patch their own version but then you're always one step behind from the western big tech companies that sit at the table. It also cost extra effort and man power that could have gone into creating new features.

If i was in a position of power that's how i would do it if i had to plan it out. It's not a complete exclusion its just relegating Eastern tech companies to the back of the line and out of leadership position. We have seen this sort of behaviour already with Github banning Iranian accounts(because sanctions prevented doing business) or open source packages that do file system/console textual message related stuff only on Russian computers etc.
 
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ansy1968

Brigadier
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european_guy said:
The article in itself is just hype, the real content is the link to above document that is from 2014-2015, so already quite old.
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@european_guy Bro it's a Chinese publication so its up to you to believed or not, and yes the article is old, I just want to highlight that many Chinese scientific Institution are working on an EUVL solution and Peking University is one of them. It's hard to prove the credibility since its a Chinese publication , we have our biases and no western publication will ever report such achievement. It was one of many dots that need to be connect regarding the Chinese EUVL story.
 
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gelgoog

Lieutenant General
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Hendrik_2000 said:
A top Chinese computer scientist said China is better positioned than Russia to cope with possible sanctions on chip design architecture from Western countries, adding that the country could develop a different ecosystem based on the RISC-V architecture and expand it among members of the Belt and Road Initiative.
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This is utter bollocks. Russia has several native CPU architectures and even ISAs.

Russia has Elbrus2K (VLIW), ELVEES (MIPS derived). Russia also designed their own SPARC compatible chips like MCST-R2000.
Of those they are all native Russian architecture chips and Elbrus2K is even a native ISA with its own compilers.

Finally Russia also has RISC-V chip design companies including Syntacore who is a founding member of RISC-V Foundation.

Russia got hit with sanctions from the UK, and this means that Baikal Electronics cannot license any new ARM chip designs or ISA modifications they had not acquired before. Any new ARM IP period.
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This is also a warning to Chinese companies like HiSilicon or Phytium who use ARM architecture chips. Thus far the UK has not made semiconductor sanctions on China but this establishes a precedent. This is a problem because ARM is the defacto standard ISA on Android smartphones and is increasingly the golden standard for cloud servers. Not being able to access new processor core design licenses is bad enough but not being able to access new ISA licenses is a killer in my point of view. It means Russia will eventually be unable to make 100% compatible ARM chips when the ISA eventually changes and sell them in the market.

There was already a move towards RISC-V for embedded applications and some move towards use of it in servers. But I think mainstream RISC-V server use is likely a decade away. Given what happened it is probably a good idea to move towards RISC-V on smartphones as well. But this means a performance hit on Android apps. Intel tried competing with ARM on Android and failed miserably.

Russia's problem is their feeble semiconductor fabrication and supply chain, together with lackluster software toolchain for their own architectures. Nothing to do with chip designs.
 
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european_guy

Junior Member
Registered Member
ansy1968 said:
@european_guy Bro it's a Chinese publication so its up to you to believed or not, and yes the article is old, I just want to highlight that many Chinese scientific Institution are working on an EUVL solution and Peking University is one of them. It's hard to prove the credibility since its a Chinese publication , we have our biases and no western publication will ever report such achievement. It was one of many dots that need to be connect regarding the Chinese EUVL story.
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Sorry, maybe I was not clear.

The reported article that you copied verbatim just introduces the actual content in the reported link. I think the linked article (
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) is good and I have no doubts believing it, just that is a bit old and for sure current state is already much different from reported.

If we really want to be nitpicking I can note that the article, published now in 2022-06-24, reports as big news another article that was written 8 years ago, without mentioning it. That's why I said it was hyped.
 
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european_guy

Junior Member
Registered Member
gelgoog said:
Russia got hit with sanctions from the UK, and this means that Baikal Electronics cannot license any new ARM chip designs or ISA modifications they had not acquired before. Any new ARM IP period.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
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UK guys want to copy US...but UK is not US.

They have very little left regarding high tech in processors. Imagination Technologies has been sold to China fund, and ARM to Japanese fund.

If they now want to play at the ban game like their big brother, I'd guess they will further lose importance in the field.

Regarding China, the sooner they move to RISC-V, the better. Not just to abandon ARM, but because, once will exists a credible RISC-V alternative, also the eventual push to ban ARM on China will weaken, because it will be considered ineffective by UK-US.
 
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xypher

Senior Member
Registered Member
gelgoog said:
This is utter bollocks. Russia has several native CPU architectures and even ISAs.

Russia has Elbrus2K (VLIW), ELVEES (MIPS derived). Russia also designed their own SPARC compatible chips like MCST-R2000.
Of those they are all native Russian architecture chips and Elbrus2K is even a native ISA with its own compilers.

Finally Russia also has RISC-V chip design companies including Syntacore who is a founding member of RISC-V Foundation.

Russia got hit with sanctions from the UK, and this means that Baikal Electronics cannot license any new ARM chip designs or ISA modifications they had not acquired before. Any new ARM IP period.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

This is also a warning to Chinese companies like HiSilicon or Phytium who use ARM architecture chips. Thus far the UK has not made semiconductor sanctions on China but this establishes a precedent. This is a problem because ARM is the defacto standard ISA on Android smartphones and is increasingly the golden standard for cloud servers. Not being able to access new processor core design licenses is bad enough but not being able to access new ISA licenses is a killer in my point of view. It means Russia will eventually be unable to make 100% compatible ARM chips when the ISA eventually changes and sell them in the market.

There was already a move towards RISC-V for embedded applications and some move towards use of it in servers. But I think mainstream RISC-V server use is likely a decade away. Given what happened it is probably a good idea to move towards RISC-V on smartphones as well. But this means a performance hit on Android apps. Intel tried competing with ARM on Android and failed miserably.

Russia's problem is their feeble semiconductor fabrication and supply chain, together with lackluster software toolchain for their own architectures. Nothing to do with chip designs.
Click to expand...
No, I think this guy is mostly correct:
1) China already has access to Zen 1 architecture processors which outperform any Russian solutions (e.g. even Russian state bank Sberbank refused to adopt
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because of its vastly inferior performance and high cost) and that is not subject to any sanctions since all the design is already in China, meaning that China is already more secure against losing access to cutting-edge chip designs;
2) China has x86 design information and licenses, meaning that making compatible CPUs is far easier - they don't need to include x86 translators;
3) if the news about new Zhaoxin processors being comparable to Zen 1 are true, then Russia is far behind even indigenous Chinese solutions;
4) China has already demonstrated the ability to design and fab manycore processors for supercomputers, and even older Chinese designs (like Sunway TaihuLight) are still holding up in the rankings with decent consumption-performance trade-offs, top Russian supercomputers use Intel processors and NVIDIA GPUs;
5) his point about "talent pool and large market" is absolutely correct - China can afford to have an indigenous semiconductor industry because of the vast market and human resources, Russia cannot and without having indigenous fabrication capacity, all that chip design is absolutely useless. For example, Russia can now only fab their old 90 nm designs which have performance at Pentium 3 level.

So I think saying "China is in a better position than Russia against chip design sanctions" is factually correct.
 
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ansy1968

Brigadier
Registered Member
european_guy said:
Sorry, maybe I was not clear.

The reported article that you copied verbatim just introduces the actual content in the reported link. I think the linked article (
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) is good and I have no doubts believing it, just that is a bit old and for sure current state is already much different from reported.
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No problem bro, that link is to support my post that many Chinese Institutions are working on EUVL project so I just add that up to highlight that Peking University is one of many.
european_guy said:
If we really want to be nitpicking I can note that the article, published now in 2022-06-24, reports as big news another article that was written 8 years ago, without mentioning it. That's why I said it was hyped.
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@european_guy bro that publication is a month old and I'm hesitant to post it until I saw a YT video.

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707 views3 weeks ago

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asml #chinanews #euv.
 
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pmc

Major
Registered Member
xypher said:
No, I think this guy is mostly correct:
1) China already has access to Zen 1 architecture processors which outperform any Russian solutions (e.g. even Russian state bank Sberbank refused to adopt
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
because of its vastly inferior performance and high cost) and that is not subject to any sanctions since all the design is already in China, meaning that China is already more secure against losing access to cutting-edge chip designs;
2) China has x86 design information and licenses, meaning that making compatible CPUs is far easier - they don't need to include x86 translators;
3) if the news about new Zhaoxin processors being comparable to Zen 1 are true, then Russia is far behind even indigenous Chinese solutions;
4) China has already demonstrated the ability to design and fab manycore processors for supercomputers, and even older Chinese designs (like Sunway TaihuLight) are still holding up in the rankings with decent consumption-performance trade-offs, top Russian supercomputers use Intel processors and NVIDIA GPUs;
5) his point about "talent pool and large market" is absolutely correct - China can afford to have an indigenous semiconductor industry because of the vast market and human resources, Russia cannot and without having indigenous fabrication capacity, all that chip design is absolutely useless. For example, Russia can now only fab their old 90 nm designs which have performance at Pentium 3 level.

So I think saying "China is in a better position than Russia against chip design sanctions" is factually correct.
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It is because Russia hast spend any money on semiconductors that will make it competitive. Once Russia $200 to $300b on semiconductor than real results will show up. just like in Food and energy production.
 
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