But...but the AMERICAN EXPERT said China can only produce only a “very small” volume of 7nm chips.
Chinese semiconductor industry
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Cannot open the link, but I found an introductory article directly from .
It seems confirmed that Huawei's Kirin 9000s is built on SMIC’s N+2 7nm process, this is an improved version of last year N+1 that was used on crypto chip Minerva, in particular in N+2 has been added embedded SRAM integration (and I think Techinsights will find also other improvements in their analysis).
Mainly now SMIC can fabricate any kind of logic chip at 7nm. This is huge!
We still don't know the capacity, but if Huawei put Mate 60 Pro on sell in the open market, I'd expect to be a sensible volume, they cannot push such a new chip (with all the related buzz) with only tiny number of Kirin 9000s available.
Regarding the Kirin 9000s, I've been mostly impressed by the new and original IP on the GPU. Considering that is fully new and that graphic drivers need years (not months) of polishing to squeeze the last drop of performance out of a new GPU, we can assume graphic performance will increase sensibly when drivers mature.
It would be odd if Huawei invested the huge amount of time/resources/money needed to develop a new GPU IP just for smartphones, we can realistically expect that GPU will be ported on PC, and that is a huge thing. Currently in China there is only Moore Threads to fight against Nvidia/AMD, but is really a David against Goliath fight....probably in the future also big brother will enter the battlefield.
EDIT: another point I want to mention is the maturity of the EDA software!
Huawei cannot use US EDA trio (Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor graphic), so they had to design the chip using localized software. Not only this, also the hardware libraries used by SMIC to import the design must have been fully developed in China. This is a big news by itself: now is confirmed that exists a full EDA ecosystem, from design to masks, to foundry, able to develop a chip as complex as the Kirin 9000s, i.e. at the state of the art, regarding the needed EDA tools.
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absolutely not
You mean Kunpeng CPUs? Hisilicon KunPeng-920 was launched 4 and half years ago.
And yes, they are launching new Kunpeng and Ascend chips soon
Nothing secretive or unexpected now that we've seen what SMIC is capable of
Actually, it most likely uses NXT 2050i and/or 2100i as part of process that also uses 1980i.
When are you going to finally give SMIC some respect after spending years hailing Huawei as the driving force for everything?
Empyrean said earlier this year they fully cover 7nm EDA & it even covers some 5nm node. I don't know why people keep on giving HW credit for everything.
It's truly disrespectful to everyone else hard at work in Chinese IC industry.
Interesting thing that you noted on SRAM, since the L2 cache size on 9000s appears quite small SLC compared to something like A15. This appears to be something HW & SMIC can work together to improve on 9100
I wonder when people will finally come out with actual #s for transistor density because it looks truly impressive to me. Reaching something like 130-140mtr/mm2 seems quite possible before hitting ceiling with NXT 2100i
I truly did not expect Huawei to be able to put out such a full featured SoC in such a small real estate in 9000S
The ground is set for a lot of improvement in areas like GPU, NPU and SRAM. Even CPU itself can continue to be improved at higher frequency level for lower power consumption.
How does techinsights know that Huawei is using SMIC?
To me it makes perfect sense for Huawei to have ownership over their fabs. They are big enough and SMIC risks losing their existing US customers and suppliers by being associated directly with Huawei.
To me it makes perfect sense for Huawei to have ownership over their fabs. They are big enough and SMIC risks losing their existing US customers and suppliers by being associated directly with Huawei.
Sir Huawei is the end user customer, without them whom would SMIC FAB those chip, and I may add the customers usually set the spec parameters and requirements. The reason why Apple the Customer, TSMC the Fabricator and ASML the equipment maker are such a formidable team, Their synergism is a wonder to behold.
your continued lack of respect for SMIC is astonishing
SMIC probably has something that is close to Samsung 4nm process in transistor density already. Samsung was still having yield issues with this when producing SD 1 Gen 1 2 yrs ago. SMIC did this all without any EUV.
And people spent a week wondering if Huawei made 9000S. Do people even realize what SMIC has accomplished here?
Let's face it, SMIC is saving Huawei's bacon with new generation Ascend/Kunpeng chips as well as Kirin line SoC
It's getting SMIC's full N+2 process output
I mean each fab has their own IPs. They already did a teardown of N+1 process so they know what SMIC FinFet architecture & feature set looks like
It continues to amaze me that people just don't realize what has been accomplished here.
Every SMIC US customer can be replaced by domestic ones. SMIC is fully booked 55nm and up. America is already violating its agreement by not servicing any machine sold to SMSC. SMIC has to find its own maintenance and support for them. Nothing lost here
A copium article from Washington Post
I read it for you so you don't have to...the only interesting data point and the reason of this post is this:
So regarding the news of last week of a license extension of Dutch government for ASML, we are talking of 3 new machines to be sent to China (maybe to SMIC itself).
Yes, I remember that news on Empyrean, sorry not to mention them. I didn't mean Huawei made all by itself....
...but Huawei has a special role in this tech war, a unique, single, very critical role that nobody else has. It's not by chance that Trump choose Huawei as the one to "punish" to "educate" the other hundred...and it is not only out of the will of its owner that Huawei is fiercely and proudly fighting back since 5 years now.
There is a huge symbolic meaning on this Huawei company, both for US and China.
SMIC, they are very brave, I admire them, not only for the very big technical achievement but also because they accepted to be part of this "clash of titans". Now they are even more exposed to US fury, anything can happen, including banning on materials, US customers, etc..but they know this for sure and accepted this.
I read it for you so you don't have to...the only interesting data point and the reason of this post is this:
So regarding the news of last week of a license extension of Dutch government for ASML, we are talking of 3 new machines to be sent to China (maybe to SMIC itself).
Yes, I remember that news on Empyrean, sorry not to mention them. I didn't mean Huawei made all by itself....
...but Huawei has a special role in this tech war, a unique, single, very critical role that nobody else has. It's not by chance that Trump choose Huawei as the one to "punish" to "educate" the other hundred...and it is not only out of the will of its owner that Huawei is fiercely and proudly fighting back since 5 years now.
There is a huge symbolic meaning on this Huawei company, both for US and China.
SMIC, they are very brave, I admire them, not only for the very big technical achievement but also because they accepted to be part of this "clash of titans". Now they are even more exposed to US fury, anything can happen, including banning on materials, US customers, etc..but they know this for sure and accepted this.
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Looks like Huawei is all in on Kirin chips despite still having a huge stash of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Lol, no other chip designers in China should be expecting 7nm capacity from SMIC next yr
Expect all the medium range phones to also using 9000S
Again 9000S power consumption better than 888, but worse than 8 Gen 2. But i think the important part is that for your regular usage, it's power consumption is okay, maybe worse than 8G2, but not significantly. How much time are people playing gaming on their phone, anyways?
News hit some of them so hard that they skipped anger and went straight for bargaining.
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