Chinese semiconductor industry

european_guy said:

Instead if I'm China I would leave the smartphones chips as the last ones

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I would also leave the smartphone chips as some of China's last productions, but probably not for the reason you prefer. Smartphone chips competitive with the best from the West are necessarily among the last for China to produce because they are some of the most complex chips around. So China will need time to reach the world-class level with these chips.

european_guy said:

Keeping buy US chips, China is indirectly paying billions of $ to water down US policies. It works nicely!

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Yes, if China were extremely stupid, it would continue to buy smartphone chips from the West, neglecting its local vendors. That would indeed work nicely -- for the West. China's internal growth would be stunted, which is what the West wants. China would be vulnerable to Western sanctions and would effectively be another slave to the West, just as the Taiwanese and the Japanese are now. So why should China be so stupid?

gelgoog said:

The problem is SMIC will be expanding into what is an established market. They will have to compete on price. It is a race to the bottom basically. And SMIC is competing against factories which were built at a time when there wasn't the current shortage in tools and inflated prices on everything.

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Not at all. In China, the market for sanction-free chips is brand new. For several years to come, a fab like SMIC will be able to sell all the fab capacity it can build.

gelgoog said:

SMIC is doing well to make this massive expansion. But they are basically cut out from further business development by the US ban on EUV.

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That is exactly what the Taiwanese hope. The probability, however, is that mainland China will have its own EUV machines in a few years.

Bellum_Romanum said:

YMTC isn't cost competitive, but their government has subsidized them to the tune of $24B to date. This funding has enabled YMTC to exist and build fabs where a normal free market company would have folded long ago. They also have predatory pricing and undercut the industry so they can take market share (which is illegal). This type of mercantilism really distorts the market and is a huge threat to South Korea as a country.

People cry foul against these export bans against China because it doesn't uphold true free market principles, but the reason the export bans exist is because China isn't upholding free market principles.

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If YMTC was not subsidized by the government China would be even more vulnerable to US tech embargoes. Thank God the Chinese government is not as naive as that or else the country's tech sector would be completely fucked right now. Play by the rules? You first.

hero said:

both the amd and intel have similar TDP but the intel has more cores and also comes with igpu which means it is more powerful while also generating same amount of heat...does that mean that the so called TSMC 7nm is just a marketing trick? to make amd look better when their product are actually just a reinvention of the wheel? i actually do not have much respect to TSMC or even Liang Mong Song cause i think they are just implementing the ASML solution without own development?

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Intel processors come with a mix of large and small cores. So yes they have "more cores" but the performance of those cores is not the same. And all AMD processors will come with iGPU starting with Zen 4 which has an RDNA2 GPU on the I/O die on the processor. Zen 4 will use TSMC 5nm and be released late this year.

manatee988 said:

If YMTC was not subsidized by the government China would be even more vulnerable to US tech embargoes. Thank God the Chinese government is not as naive as that or else the country's tech sector would be completely fucked right now. Play by the rules? You first.

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I have not heard of YMTC getting more funding than a similar company would get. SK Hynix and Samsung also got money for making NAND fabs in China. In fact without foreign fabs it would have been impossible to even attempt the Made in China 2025 goals.

The US is now attempting to shut down investments in Chinese fabs by forbidding EUV sales, and now with sanctions on GAA design tools.

hero said:

both the amd and intel have similar TDP but the intel has more cores and also comes with igpu which means it is more powerful while also generating same amount of heat...does that mean that the so called TSMC 7nm is just a marketing trick? to make amd look better when their product are actually just a reinvention of the wheel? i actually do not have much respect to TSMC or even Liang Mong Song cause i think they are just implementing the ASML solution without own development?

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Intel CPUs have far larger TDP than the AMD CPUs. For example, i7-12700 has a TDP of 180W while a more powerful Ryzen 5900 is only 105W.

You clearly don't understand the semiconductor fabrication process if you say that "TSMC is just implementing ASML solution". First of all, TSMC is leading the R&D for semicon fabrication - they have the most advanced nodes out of all their competitors, with Samsung being the closest one but having worse yields for 5 and 7 nm plus worse density. Secondly, ASML only produces equipment for one of the many stages of the fabrication process, it does not produce any full-cycle solutions nor conducts R&D for chips, so there is nothing to implement.

56860 said:

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Absolutely massive - YMTC to supply Apple with 3D NAND for upcoming iphone 14s. Further integrating China to global supply chains.

Decoupling happening everywhere except in the numbers and facts. Brutal.

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Bellum_Romanum said:

YMTC isn't cost competitive, but their government has subsidized them to the tune of $24B to date. This funding has enabled YMTC to exist and build fabs where a normal free market company would have folded long ago. They also have predatory pricing and undercut the industry so they can take market share (which is illegal). This type of mercantilism really distorts the market and is a huge threat to South Korea as a country.

People cry foul against these export bans against China because it doesn't uphold true free market principles, but the reason the export bans exist is because China isn't upholding free market principles.

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Someone needs to refute these anti-Chinese semiconductor related comments at that website.

Bellum_Romanum said:

YMTC isn't cost competitive, but their government has subsidized them to the tune of $24B to date. This funding has enabled YMTC to exist and build fabs where a normal free market company would have folded long ago. They also have predatory pricing and undercut the industry so they can take market share (which is illegal). This type of mercantilism really distorts the market and is a huge threat to South Korea as a country.

People cry foul against these export bans against China because it doesn't uphold true free market principles, but the reason the export bans exist is because China isn't upholding free market principles.

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South Korean industry was built through subsidies, lol. What are the "free market principles" btw - if American companies and their lapdogs cannot compete, ban the competition? Good that China does not follow those rules then.

Bellum_Romanum said:

YMTC isn't cost competitive, but their government has subsidized them to the tune of $24B to date. This funding has enabled YMTC to exist and build fabs where a normal free market company would have folded long ago.

Click to expand...

They also have predatory pricing and undercut the industry so they can take market share (which is illegal). This type of mercantilism really distorts the market and is a huge threat to South Korea as a country.

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People cry foul against these export bans against China because it doesn't uphold true free market principles, but the reason the export bans exist is because China isn't upholding free market principles.

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The USA did everything you decry when it was developing. According to , "Like Franklin, Alexander Hamilton was present at the creation. And because of a series of reports he authored as the first secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton is widely (and rightly) considered the founder of American industrial policy. In his Report on Manufactures, Hamilton outlined a system that included tariffs, subsidies, and investments. First, imposing tariffs, bans on some foreign goods, and prohibitions on exporting certain materials would protect and promote the development of infant industry in America. Subsidies, prizes, and exemptions from duties would encourage private investment in particular sectors. And nurturing discovery and investing in infrastructure would bring innovation and growth." (Emphasis added.)

Yes, Alexander Hamilton was one of the US's founding fathers -- you can see his signature on the Constitution.

Why should China be condemned for doing what the USA did?

@Bellum_Romanum is odd here. Normally, he goes to town with his jingoism. LOL.

Everyone is subsidizing their own companies. They complain about China because China can afford to subsidize all of its high-tech industries while other countries have only enough resources to focus on 1 or 2 high-tech industries