Chinese semiconductor industry

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Tam

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ansy1968 said:
@gadgetcool5 @Hendrik_2000

Another one, boy oh boy 2021 is starting to be a good year for China domestic IC.

from cnTechPost

Cambricon's first AI training chip starts mass production with TSMC's 7nm process​

January 21, 2021 By:
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On January 21, Chinese AI company Cambricon's MLU 290 and accelerator card, Xuansi 1000 smart accelerator debuted after mass production.
The MLU 290 smart chip is Cambricon's first training chip, using TSMC's 7nm process, integrating 46 billion transistors. It supports AI training, inference, or hybrid AI compute acceleration tasks.
Cambricon's first AI training chip starts mass production with TSMC's 7nm process-cnTechPost's first AI training chip starts mass production with TSMC's 7nm process-cnTechPost

Cambricon is the first AI chip stock in China. Previously Cambricon has launched MLU 100 and MLU 270 in the cloud, both on a 16nm process.
MLU 290 is fully upgraded in terms of architecture, memory, and interface. Compared to MLU 270, MLU 290 achieves a 4x increase in peak arithmetic power, 12x increase in memory bandwidth, and 19x increase in inter-chip communication bandwidth.
Based on MLU 290, Cambricon has also launched MLU290-M5 intelligent accelerator card and Xuansi 1000 intelligent accelerator.


The accelerator card adopts Cambricon's self-developed MLU-Link technology, providing AI arithmetic power up to 1024 TOPS with maximum heat dissipation of 350W; the Xuansi 1000 intelligent accelerator integrates four MLU 290s, with a maximum AI arithmetic power of over 4.1 PetaOPS INT4.
It is worth noting that Huawei and NVidia have long launched the same type of chip with a 7nm process. After losing Huawei as a major customer, Cambricon's revenue in the first three quarters of last year was RMB 158 million, only 35% of 2019, with a loss of more than RMB 300 million.
However, the launch of the advanced process chip has stimulated capital markets, with Cambricon up about 18% today.

Cambricon currently has a market cap of RMB 68 billion, although it is still below the highest market cap of RMB 100 billion reached after the company's IPO.



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The MLU 290 smart chip is Cambricon's first training chip, using TSMC's 7nm process, integrating 46 ...
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I can expect that a lot of these are going into Bitcoin mining operations.

China accounts for 60% of the Bitcoin mining in the world.

There was a massive increase of Bitcoin mining in the world in 2020. And as miners soup up graphic cards in quantities, the prices of GPU has gone up and GPU cards are in shortage, which causes the prices of gaming PCs to rise.

Another thing I want to point out is that as Apple, Qualcomm are moving their latest products into 5nm, TSMC needs to find customers to sustain their older and more mature processes. They definitely need the Chinese market for this.
 
quantumlight

quantumlight

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Tam said:
I can expect that a lot of these are going into Bitcoin mining operations.

China accounts for 60% of the Bitcoin mining in the world.

There was a massive increase of Bitcoin mining in the world in 2020. And as miners soup up graphic cards in quantities, the prices of GPU has gone up and GPU cards are in shortage, which causes the prices of gaming PCs to rise.

Another thing I want to point out is that as Apple, Qualcomm are moving their latest products into 5nm, TSMC needs to find customers to sustain their older and more mature processes. They definitely need the Chinese market for this.
Click to expand...


Are we sure that Bitcoin is not CIA? Serious question... Remember back in the good old days when CIA needed dark money to run its black ops it would run drugs, and use cold hard cash to buy out/bribe local governments to sell out or do coups etc etc and it was a messy operation, lots of HUMINT, deep cover, and boat loads of cash... well that was inconvenient...

The internet changed all of that... now their spies don't need to use One Time Pads in the field, they can use TOR for communications... TOR, started as a Navy project, was then "open sourced" but the real goal was to get enough of the privacy loving public in on the platform so that the real agents can mask their traffic better against traffic analysis attacks etc... to enhance the anonymity

Bitcoin does for money what TOR did for communication... With bitcoin CIA / governments can pay their agents in the field or whomever mercenaries they bid for instantly and if you run bitcoin over TOR it cannot even be traced by local governments they are trying to subvert.... its a perfect modern combination that assists with logistics of their dark ops

Now, for the larger conspiracy... the way bitcoin is designed, all the coins have to be 'mined' by GPU/ASIC and the difficulty of mining gets exponentially harder over time... Bitcoin along has propped up Nvidia to super heights and inflated the cost of graphics cards everywhere.. there is multiprong benefits for this masterful stroke of genius... by designing a cryptocurrency and putting it out in the wild, the CIA benefits from the crowdsourcing effect whereby the international public basically subsidizes for the development/advancement (arms race of gpu) of graphics cards, but more importantly AI... as AI inference uses the same cuda cores as a grphical GPU... so America is using the world to prop up its AI industry... Now that US controls TSMC and Nvidia buying ARM, USA positions itself to win the windfall of all cryptomining arms races!

See how Nvidia is so rich they buy out ARM... and ARM is the future of CPU, not Intel... and know Nvidia position themselves as AI company, and getting into chip fab, the whole stack, IoT, everything... even self driving car modules etc etc etc... all due to leveraging the rise of bitcoin...

Lastly, Bitcoin if ran by CIA, means CIA holds 10% of the inital set of coins which costed them zero money from the get go, but say one day the market cap of bitcoin is in the hundreds of trillions, or if the US petrodollar gets replaced by bitcoin... well in that case the US still wins, because its controlling it all, controlled opposition! The left hand and the right, two sides of the one same coin.... US dollar almost collapsed during end of brentwoods when Nixon took off the gold standard then hey lets tie Oil to this thing and extended it peetrodollar another three days or so... now petrodollar ending because China is going green but US says hey gets all move to bitcoin... remember the creator of bitcoin owns 10% of all bitcoins, NO ONE KNOWS WHO CREATED BITCOIN, if the creator is actually CIA, then if we all move to bitcoin someday, then effectively the US got 10% of the entire wealth of the whole world FOR FREE!!!!!

And bitcoin security depends on the security ciphers and protocols that NSA designed.... so if there is a backdoor in the cipher itself or an exploit that only NSA knows about... one day the whole world gets on bitcoin standard and that gives US the leverage to sanction, to freeze accounts, to arbitrarily override the "proof of work" and forge fake transactions basically it makes the US a bank that can do whatever it wants and we are all suckered onto the platform....

Imagine Twitter but for banks... and how the US uses twitter to silence any narratives that goes against US hegemony... one day the US can use bitcoin to do the same sort of financial sanctions... twitter's power comes from the network effect, the fact that the whole world has buy into it... the same for bitcoin too... China can create a twitter clone but it doesn't have the network effect in its favor, and same for all the other altcoins, only bitcoin is poised to really get entrenched in the future of fintech markets and used and adopted worldwide, if USA owns the bitcoin, holds the secret 10%, and has zero day exploits for the security ciphers, then its US dollar gets extended another 50 years!
 
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localizer

localizer

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ansy1968 said:
@localizer

Because they're afraid of RISC-V and ARM? I read X86 is not viable for AI?
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I think this is more about their Fabrication technology rather than X86.

Intel's DUV process is pretty advanced. Lots to learn from, everything from chemistry to material science to optics.


But ever since they started to have more Indians in the company, they started to stall.
 
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Weaasel

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WTAN said:
The SMEE 90nm Lithograph was first delivered in 2016 and actually has a large market share in China in its segment which is for mature processes of 90nm and higher.
It is actually priced competitively and is popular with local FABs. It gives stiff competition to similar products from Nikon and ASML.
We dont really hear much about the SSA600 as everyone is mainly interested in the latest processes like 7nm and the latest products from ASML.
The SMEE 65nm DUVL is currently being mass produced and will be just as successful.
The SMEE 28nm DUVL is also guaranteed to be successful due to the sanctions on Chinese FABs.
Thats why ASML, Nikon and Canon are starting to panic as they will lose market share in DUVL.
They are making assurances that their equipment are not affected by any US sanctions but the Chinese FABs just dont really believe them at all.
Once the SMEE DUVL becomes available, foreign DUVL sales in China will become non-existent.
Click to expand...
Trump or no Trump, the cat is out of the bag. China will develop the capability of producing every single product that goes into manufacturing the most sophisticated semiconductor IC chips and the IC chips themselves, as well as maximize commercialization of them by domestic companies. Absolutely no foreign entity can be trusted to be a reliable supplier of China.
 
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Oldschool

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5nm may turn out may not worthwhile. It's faster than 7nm but standby leakage current too high causing the chip overheated.

Both Qualcomm chip 888 using Samsung 5nm and apple a14 under tsmc have this issue.

The 5nm leakage current is back to 28nm level.

This is bad news for them.
 
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antiterror13

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Oldschool said:
5nm may turn out may not worthwhile. It's faster than 7nm but standby leakage current too high causing the chip overheated.

Both Qualcomm chip 888 using Samsung 5nm and apple a14 under tsmc have this issue.

The 5nm leakage current is back to 28nm level.

This is bad news for them.
Click to expand...

Any sources ?
 
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ansy1968

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Oldschool said:
5nm may turn out may not worthwhile. It's faster than 7nm but standby leakage current too high causing the chip overheated.

Both Qualcomm chip 888 using Samsung 5nm and apple a14 under tsmc have this issue.

The 5nm leakage current is back to 28nm level.

This is bad news for them.
Click to expand...
@Oldschool

Hi Bro, what I know is that Samsung is having that issue, but not TSMC, Huawei and Apple 5nm chips perform better than Qualcomm and is planning a switch to TSMC as a replacement for Huawei because of the ban. That is why Samsung is marketing its 5nm EXYNOS 1080 chips to Chinese cellphone makers like OPPO, VIVO and XIAOMI to make up for scale and improve its yield and performance.
 
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Weaasel

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gadgetcool5 said:
TSMC does not need to produce the lithograph because it has the soft power to get it without producing it. So it can focus on its core competency which is absolutely correct. SMIC on the other hand must produce the lithograph because it cannot get it due to China's bad relations with the West. But it cannot.

You are right that it has old and wrong information and SMIC is not 4-5 years behind TSMC. It is 15 years behind TSMC because all of Dr. Liang's designs and even its 14nm and mature node products cannot be produced without Western equipment. Dr. Liang's work has basically been entirely wasted. The article was too generous to
gadgetcool5 said:
TSMC does not need to produce the lithograph because it has the soft power to get it without producing it. So it can focus on its core competency which is absolutely correct. SMIC on the other hand must produce the lithograph because it cannot get it due to China's bad relations with the West. But it cannot.

You are right that it has old and wrong information and SMIC is not 4-5 years behind TSMC. It is 15 years behind TSMC because all of Dr. Liang's designs and even its 14nm and mature node products cannot be produced without Western equipment. Dr. Liang's work has basically been entirely wasted. The article was too generous to SMIC.
Click to expand...

SMIC does not produce its own lithographic equipment. There are Chinese manufacturers of lithographic equipment, most notably SMEE.
Click to expand...
 
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