Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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More customer for SMIC N+2 7nm chip, the Americans are making SMIC great again.
Sir from your previous post about Huawei new chip introduction for next year, it's 7nm rather than 14nm or both?
Enflame uses a 12nm technology, unknown foundry
Biren uses 7nm process from TSMC
Cambricon uses 7nm process from TSMC
Hanbo Semiconductor uses a 7nm technology, unknown foundry
All these new companies use 7nm or less advanced nodes. It is very wise for them not to use nodes below 7nm.
GPU specialized for AI are not smartphones, many less of them are needed, on the order of millions of chip, not billions. Final users are mainly big data centers and soon autonomous driving cars (but here big numbers are still few years down the road).
I give for granted that TSMC will also be banned from selling to these GPU firms (and I guess quite soon too), but if SMIC is able to scale their 7nm capacity to a decent number, then this last ban on NVIDIA will backfire hugely.
NVIDIA currently holds 90% of AI market in China!
It means a de-facto monopoly. Without banning on NVIDIA, it is easy to foresee that these new Chinese startup would have had a really hard time not only to grow, but even to survive. Now everything will be different.
This ban will at best slow down data centers build up, but US just gave away a totally dominating monopoly position in China in AI hardware.
Biren uses 7nm process from TSMC
Cambricon uses 7nm process from TSMC
Hanbo Semiconductor uses a 7nm technology, unknown foundry
All these new companies use 7nm or less advanced nodes. It is very wise for them not to use nodes below 7nm.
GPU specialized for AI are not smartphones, many less of them are needed, on the order of millions of chip, not billions. Final users are mainly big data centers and soon autonomous driving cars (but here big numbers are still few years down the road).
I give for granted that TSMC will also be banned from selling to these GPU firms (and I guess quite soon too), but if SMIC is able to scale their 7nm capacity to a decent number, then this last ban on NVIDIA will backfire hugely.
NVIDIA currently holds 90% of AI market in China!
It means a de-facto monopoly. Without banning on NVIDIA, it is easy to foresee that these new Chinese startup would have had a really hard time not only to grow, but even to survive. Now everything will be different.
This ban will at best slow down data centers build up, but US just gave away a totally dominating monopoly position in China in AI hardware.
Maybe SMIC had already consulted them about the N+2 progress and their mass production plan?
14nm stacking will be used for 7xx and 8xx . chips 7nm will be for kirin 9xx chips
This stacking of current nodes, will be very interesting when those chips inside the final products come onto the scene.
If the specs and how it will work in the final product are accurate, then this could change the IC game a lot.
The single chip from an advanced node is still a more elegant solution. But that is just another way of saying that the chip stacking will make the advanced node seemed over-engineered.
As a general rule, as a non-engineer, I believe anything over-engineered, has limited value.
Let's see how popular those end products with chip stacking turn out to be. Putting them into Huawei cell phones initially, will be putting the best face forward.
This is a perfect example of typical US wishful-plan, that works well on paper but then faces an unpleasant reality check down the road.
US is the master of these kind of ill-thought-out plans, see Afghanistan, Iraq and I am waiting for Ukraine that will backfire too sooner or later (regarding energy prices and inflation already has). Or see Huawei ban, with the consequential furious push of China for technology independence and the spread of Huawei engineers and knowledge across the full Chinese ecosystem. My personal opinion is that the ban on Huawei is a bless in disguised, the fall of a big tree has enabled the growth of the forest around it. US has worked as an ideal antitrust authority for China, free of charge.
TSMC has 61% market share on advanced nodes below 16nm
And by far the largest part of it is for serving US customers. Who thinks that after 2025 / 2026 all this will be moot and expendable just because by then Intel will open a fab or two is very delusional. US will continue to rely on Taiwan for a very long time, in fact for much longer than China.
according to this
BR100 will start mass production before the end of the year. They have in fact already started shipping.
hmm, read this
point is, China has built its super computers on 14 nm processes. This actually doesn't bite that much. In the long run, it does hurt China's cloud server providers, which is why all the major ones are probably looking at BR100 right now and have invested in others.
Thanks for posting the links to their capabilities. It seems like BR100 is way ahead of the other ones. I'd assume BR100 will come out of this looking pretty good as the high end GPU since they will be competitive against even H100. While the other ones are probably going to serve in the lower end GPU market. If Chinese cloud service providers and data centers are smart, they'd pick these Chinese options over Nvidia even in the non-banned category.
Yes, that's the key point. Even BR100 uses 7 nm process. Although, it does seem like 5 nm is possible with DUV so maybe that's what the next generation server CPU/GPUs will use.
I think American strategy would work better if they just banned more stuff to China earlier. But they only banned EUV to all of China (before SMIC was really ready to move to 5 nm process) and banned Huawei. As such, China could still buy more equipment and all the chips until now. China has gotten a few years to figure things out. And as we've seen, China is figuring things out.
It seems like the next step is for America to force TSMC away from supplying Chinese chip designers. Which means in a couple of years, TSMC will lose the entire Chinese market and have a bunch of fabs sitting around doing nothing. One thing is for sure. TSMC is going to lose its monopoly of sub 16 nm market. Nvidia is going to lose its monopoly. And at the pace we are going, Qualcomm and AMD are next.
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