Chinese semiconductor industry

KYli said:

Banning chips for Chinese consumers electronics companies would mean a global shortages of computers, dishwashers, refrigerators etc. At the height of the pandemic, many computers and printers were selling 50% to 100% more than regular prices. I think people just underestimate the importance of China being the world biggest manufacture superpower. If the West wanted to commit suicidal bans, then it is up to them to suffer hyperinflation in much more categories than just food and energy.

As for China, only smartphones and computers that require more advance chips would suffer a downgrade. Most other products would be just fine. In addition, AI chips or GPU are less difficult to make than CPU chips and usually require at least one generation less advance chips than CPU chips. 7nm chips are more than enough to satisfy the requirement of most advance GPU chips. It is software ecosystem for GPU that is probably needed more time to adopt but the US has left Chinese companies no choice and self reliance is a must not a choice.

Click to expand...

sunnymaxi said:

i always said this thing. China was lucky to escape that crucial time period not only in semiconductor but overall high end industry development.

would have been disastrous if US put same sanctions in 2000-2010 decade.

sanctions in 2022 ? HAHAHAHAHA. its too late now. horse left the stable.

Click to expand...

daifo said:

I have to agree with the above post that some folks are too optimist about China's current progress in semiconductor. If there was a complete decoupling, China's consumer electronic industry would be in a very bad place. First, the benchmark of all the China's cpu such as loongson, phytum, zhaoxin all points to them being low-mid tier. For example the highest geekbench multi-core scores I have seen them hit are in the 2000-3000 range while an apple m1 arm would hit 10,000. Second, we hear about 7nm-14nm break thrus, but I don't believe they are being produce in any sufficient quantity as the fabs for most Chinese computer CPUs are still foreign. The only mainstream cpu I have seen produce by smic was a mid tier Kirin for Huawei.


It will be a long shot, even for Biren, to replace Nvidia. “Chinese GPU start-ups are not a match for Nvidia and AMD,” said Sravan Kundojjala, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics. “Even a seasoned GPU player like AMD is struggling to compete with Nvidia in data centres.”
One of Nvidia’s key advantages is its unified device architecture, a parallel programming model, which the company began to develop in 2006. It has been widely adopted by developers as an easy way to speed up compute-intensive applications, said Kundojjala.
As such, those who want to compete against Nvidia have to create an entire software ecosystem, which is extremely difficult.
Nevertheless, there are some people willing to bet on China’s long-term ability to shake off the likes of Nvidia.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

siegecrossbow said:

China's semiconductor progress is not as ahead as the optimists think and not as backward as the pessimists think.

Click to expand...

BoraTas said:

What's going on for the last 5 years is nothing short of extraordinary, especially when you compare it to what is going on at large semiconductor corporations like Intel and Samsung. I am so glad we are discussing this topic here but I think the whole topic is overblown.

- Keeping China so behind that its military and economy face a significant disadvantage is unrealistic.

- China is the world's largest electronics manufacturer and a massive economy. It buys half of the world's semiconductors. A semiconductor boom in China was inevitable. The problem was financial and human capital requirements and existing oligopolies. But nonetheless more and more Chinese corporations would venture into the field over the time. In an even longer time period, some of them would become globally competitive. Think of what happened in the consumer electronics and construction machinery industries.

- The USA has to sell China semiconductors if it wants its semiconductor industry to make good revenues. They make a quarter of their revenue from Chinese customers and another 25% of their output (both directly or through fabs) is assembled into devices in China.

- China could just tariff or shadow ban most semiconductor imports after its industry matures enough to cover most applications, which is about to be achieved. Considering that China is 50% of the global market, the USA has no counters to this. It would cost dozens of billions to American tech companies. China already does a similar thing in aviation. Boeing sales plummeted "mysteriously". Qualcomm and Intel sales will "mysteriously" plummet in 10 years too.

Click to expand...

BoraTas said:

What's going on for the last 5 years is nothing short of extraordinary, especially when you compare it to what is going on at large semiconductor corporations like Intel and Samsung. I am so glad we are discussing this topic here but I think the whole topic is overblown.

- Keeping China so behind that its military and economy face a significant disadvantage is unrealistic.

- China is the world's largest electronics manufacturer and a massive economy. It buys half of the world's semiconductors. A semiconductor boom in China was inevitable. The problem was financial and human capital requirements and existing oligopolies. But nonetheless more and more Chinese corporations would venture into the field over the time. In an even longer time period, some of them would become globally competitive. Think of what happened in the consumer electronics and construction machinery industries.

- The USA has to sell China semiconductors if it wants its semiconductor industry to make good revenues. They make a quarter of their revenue from Chinese customers and another 25% of their output (both directly or through fabs) is assembled into devices in China.

- China could just tariff or shadow ban most semiconductor imports after its industry matures enough to cover most applications, which is about to be achieved. Considering that China is 50% of the global market, the USA has no counters to this. It would cost dozens of billions to American tech companies. China already does a similar thing in aviation. Boeing sales plummeted "mysteriously". Qualcomm and Intel sales will "mysteriously" plummet in 10 years too.

Click to expand...

tphuang said:

I actually think most people on this thread are probably overly optimistic. We also managed to chase away all the reasonable people from posting here more often. You know, people who have some knowledge of the industry, but are restricted to English sources. I would say that people here are probably lucky that China has been consistently beating expectations on all these fields. So, because China's own semiconductor industry has developed so much faster than what's reasonable, the overly optimistic people on this forum like myself are not looking like crazy people.

China seems to have it's own unique set of attributes that allow it to beat expectations in developing its own modern chip design and making industry:
1) a lot of ethnic Chinese people that have significant experience in various fields that can be persuaded to help build China's industry
2) a huge domestic demand with a lot of experience working with foreign products.
3) a lot of money
4) productive labor force with low cost/high throughput
5) large local STEM graduates.

Even with that, it probably was still possible for US to choke of China back in second Obama term if it decided to be really aggressive about going after China. Thankfully, the sanctions really only ramped up in Trump years and was still very gradual even up until now. So for the past few years, China still has been able to access most of the things technology it needed. I feel like a lot of these domestic projects really only picked up steam after the Trump bans started.

Given that we've only hit this emergency mode for 4 years, it's pretty impressive what they've produced already. What Biren developed in 3 years is nothing short of extraordinary. I don't take what Tianshu execs say about fighting for the 5% leftover by Nvidia. That's nonsense. Tianshu itself is just jealous that it's not getting the same support that Biren has gotten. And then, we have Yitian-710 which is the best current CPU of its class. Before Huawei got added to entity list, it's Kunpeng and Kirin chips were all very competitive. Even now, KunPeng-920 is widely used in Huawei servers. With this feedback loop where domestic chip makers are getting feedback and large amount of orders from domestic clients and getting software ecosystems built around, that's how you will see the local firms succeed. Id' be surprised if one of Biren, Kunlun and Hanbo do not succeed in AI GPU market. There are too many domestic players that are now incentivized to devote a lot of resources to building ecosystem around them. I would be surprised if Huawei/Hisilicon cannot design great chips again once SMIC can ramp up its N+1/N+2 production. I also will be surprised if one of Phytium, LoongSon or Zhaoxin don't significantly close gap with Intel/AMD, because they are finally getting the customers and funding needed to succeed.

Lastly, I think Qualcomm is really going to feel the pain soon. The Chinese auto industry is going to feel the threat of US chip ban more than anyone else. I reckon over the next 2/3 years, you will a significant move from Qualcomm/Nvidia auto CPUs to domestic products. And I think Nvidia is in a lot of trouble.

Click to expand...

siegecrossbow said:

China's semiconductor progress is not as ahead as the optimists think and not as backward as the pessimists think.

Click to expand...

daifo said:

I have to agree with the above post that some folks are too optimist about China's current progress in semiconductor. If there was a complete decoupling, China's consumer electronic industry would be in a very bad place. First, the benchmark of all the China's cpu such as loongson, phytum, zhaoxin all points to them being low-mid tier. For example the highest geekbench multi-core scores I have seen them hit are in the 2000-3000 range while an apple m1 arm would hit 10,000. Second, we hear about 7nm-14nm break thrus, but I don't believe they are being produce in any sufficient quantity as the fabs for most Chinese computer CPUs are still foreign. The only mainstream cpu I have seen produce by smic was a mid tier Kirin for Huawei.


It will be a long shot, even for Biren, to replace Nvidia. “Chinese GPU start-ups are not a match for Nvidia and AMD,” said Sravan Kundojjala, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics. “Even a seasoned GPU player like AMD is struggling to compete with Nvidia in data centres.”
One of Nvidia’s key advantages is its unified device architecture, a parallel programming model, which the company began to develop in 2006. It has been widely adopted by developers as an easy way to speed up compute-intensive applications, said Kundojjala.
As such, those who want to compete against Nvidia have to create an entire software ecosystem, which is extremely difficult.
Nevertheless, there are some people willing to bet on China’s long-term ability to shake off the likes of Nvidia.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

tphuang said:

I actually think most people on this thread are probably overly optimistic. We also managed to chase away all the reasonable people from posting here more often. You know, people who have some knowledge of the industry, but are restricted to English sources. I would say that people here are probably lucky that China has been consistently beating expectations on all these fields. So, because China's own semiconductor industry has developed so much faster than what's reasonable, the overly optimistic people on this forum like myself are not looking like crazy people.

China seems to have it's own unique set of attributes that allow it to beat expectations in developing its own modern chip design and making industry:
1) a lot of ethnic Chinese people that have significant experience in various fields that can be persuaded to help build China's industry
2) a huge domestic demand with a lot of experience working with foreign products.
3) a lot of money
4) productive labor force with low cost/high throughput
5) large local STEM graduates.

Even with that, it probably was still possible for US to choke of China back in second Obama term if it decided to be really aggressive about going after China. Thankfully, the sanctions really only ramped up in Trump years and was still very gradual even up until now. So for the past few years, China still has been able to access most of the things technology it needed. I feel like a lot of these domestic projects really only picked up steam after the Trump bans started.

Given that we've only hit this emergency mode for 4 years, it's pretty impressive what they've produced already. What Biren developed in 3 years is nothing short of extraordinary. Biren is going to get to work with the very best partners in the world in terms of building ecosystems around its chips. No other new player in the world will ever get the kind of royal treatment that Biren will be getting from China's domestic AI industry. I don't take what Tianshu execs say about fighting for the 5% leftover by Nvidia. That's nonsense. Tianshu itself is just jealous that it's not getting the same support that Biren has gotten. And then, we have Yitian-710 which is the best current CPU of its class. Before Huawei got added to entity list, it's Kunpeng and Kirin chips were all very competitive. Even now, KunPeng-920 is widely used in Huawei servers. With this feedback loop where domestic chip makers are getting feedback and large amount of orders from domestic clients and getting software ecosystems built around, that's how you will see the local firms succeed. Id' be surprised if one of Biren, Kunlun and Hanbo do not succeed in AI GPU market. There are too many domestic players that are now incentivized to devote a lot of resources to building ecosystem around them. I would be surprised if Huawei/Hisilicon cannot design great chips again once SMIC can ramp up its N+1/N+2 production. I also will be surprised if one of Phytium, LoongSon or Zhaoxin don't significantly close gap with Intel/AMD, because they are finally getting the customers and funding needed to succeed.

Lastly, I think Qualcomm is really going to feel the pain soon. The Chinese auto industry is going to feel the threat of US chip ban more than anyone else. I reckon over the next 2/3 years, you will a significant move from Qualcomm/Nvidia auto CPUs to domestic products. And I think Nvidia is in a lot of trouble.

Click to expand...