antiterror13
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less and less customers and orders for TSMC ... I see less and less future for TSMC
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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less and less customers and orders for TSMC ... I see less and less future for TSMC
Yeah, I just posted that earlier. As I said, I think this could slow Biren down by a few months, but nothing more than that. It will really do nothing to stop any of the other GPUs that are under the guideline but are still much better than V100. The important point to consider is that with an established parameters, chip designers/makers will be able to get around that by designing chips right below that criteria.
Consider that BR100 is a chiplet with 2 die. BR104 is just the 1 die/chip version with half the processing power. We know even BR104 is above the guideline. So guess what, they can just nerf it to half the size of BR104 and it will be right beneath all the parameters and TSMC can claim they are not producing GPUs better than A100 and we are all good.
I did some calculations earlier. Each die of BR100/104 is about 540 mm^2. As such, you can get about 400 dies per 12-inch wafer. So even with 100 wafers, you can get 40k BR104 or 20k BR100. Given the sanction threats since A100 orders, I wouldn't be surprised if they fast tracked orders and got them all delivered in this past couple of weeks. I would be surprised if they don't have enough stocked up to get the initial clients on board and testing their chips. That would include Inspur, Baidu, Ping An and a couple of other majors ones. Nerfing BR104 to be entirely compliant shouldn't be that hard. It will still be much better than V100 and consume a lot less power. You can just stick more of them in your data center to get the same computational power.
More importantly, this will push them even harder to work with SMIC to design a chip around their process. The yield probably very good, but this is where China can subsidize these industries to make them viable. If MIIT is taking this seriously, then subsidizing the one part of your industry that is attacked will be the way to go.
Keep in mind that China does not need to go 100% indigenous over night. That's not a great strategy. Only the people in Washington are driven to go out of their way to sabotage Chinese businesses. All the Chinese companies like Biren, SMIC, Horizon Robotics, YMTC will work with foreign companies as long as they can while also cultivate domestic options.
Meh, this doesn't say much. It's still just a bunch of people who think that China can tie its own show laces. They are only slightly less obnoxious than the type that spent a week gloating that no foreign companies can help China anymore. And still refuses to acknowledge ASML's own statement that they are minimally impacted. That Bloomberg article even implied that Hygon was in trouble even though Hygon said in its own earnings call that they are not affected.
This is what bloomberg said
You want to guess who is affected? TSMC. That's because their Chinese clients are all moving to SMIC as quickly as possible. At this point, I'm waiting to hear what SMIC has to say. Unless they do significant slow down of their expansion plans, my prognosis of the impact of this law won't change.
Can SMIC really handle these orders for 7nm GPUs? The 7nm chip we heard reported on wasn't that sophisticated right?
The N+1 chips you heard about were some ASICs that were produced in July of last year. They've had over a year to be able to raise the yield on more advanced chips by now. With increasing number of NXT-2050i and NXT-2100i, they should be able to handle larger and more complicated die. Based on the recent report, I think we are confident that their 14mm process can basically produce any sized chip at high yields. It's safe to say that they are handling more complex N+1 chips by now. I would also think they are probably producing N+2 in lower quantities by this point.
I am putting this technical analysis article from last year here in case no one saw it yet. It looks at YMTC 128L NAND and compares it with other 128L NAND products. Basically the YMTC product is superior in memory area density. And we already know it has better read and write performance. No wonder Micron is scared and US government pushed for these sanctions in attempt to cripple YMTC.
YMTC is best evidence of US BS about Chinese copycatting technology being their concern since they are using a different memory architecture from everyone else, no one else is using the same wafer bonding scheme right now.
"One would imagine it makes sense for both side to have Chinese companies to open up fabs in Europe."
I may be wrong but, without Russian gas, it makes sense to have Europeans migrate to China and create new fabs in China, not the other way around.
It seems to me that this trip of Scholz and his entourage is the sign that, after all, he may have some balls between his legs and decided to do something that might make the Americans pissed at him.
My 2 cents.
escobar
Brigadier
China chipmakers enter volume production of 5G RF chip solutions
Indeed. There is a rumor that TSMC halted production for Biren products pending further review.
It is because of the stupid law the US put into place which limits the bandwidth and performance of the chips China can fab abroad.
Same law which limits NVIDIA exports of leading edge GPUs to China.
I hope this is really fabbed in China and not designed in China and fabbed elsewhere like in Taiwan. If it is fabbed in Taiwan and they start selling these things then they will get sanctioned as well eventually.
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