Chinese semiconductor thread II

[tphuang]

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SMEC (UNT, United Nova Tech) see continued growth in auto, consumer & industrial control sector.

It has made 4.547B in first 3 quarters. Growing 18.68% YoY. I'd think they can make it to top 10 at current growth.

Expect continued research into SIC MOSFET, 12-inch silicon wafer for top customers. high voltage BCD and other analog IC also expecting speedy growth.
90% of its SIC MOSFET production since last year went toward NEV inverters.
8-inch SIC MOSFET expects to go into mass production in 2025. It had copies rolling off production line since April.

It's still in an upward growth period in production.

It's yuezhou production base has 70k wpm of is wafer
5000 wpm of 6-inch SiC mosfet
also VCSEL/GaAs and high voltage analog IC and other platforms

 

[supercat]

In the first 3 quarters of 2024, 42 Chinese chip makers saw their profits double or more.

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[huemens]

Huawei is preparing to launch a new Kunpeng ARM Server SoC with integrated HBM. Drivers for it appeared in Linux Kernel couple of weeks ago.

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Linux Preps For Kunpeng ARM Server SoC With High Bandwidth Memory​

New Linux patches from Huawei engineers are preparing new driver support for controlling High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with the ARM-based Kunpeng high performance SoC.

The patches out today are adding power control support for the HBM memory on the Kunpeng SoC and the ability to online/offline this cache.

Add a driver for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) devices, which will provide user space interfaces to power on/off the HBM devices. In Kunpeng servers, we need to control the power of HBM devices which can be power consuming and will only be used in some specialized scenarios, such as HPC. HBM memory devices in a socket are in the same power domain, and should be power off/on together.

 

[tphuang]

Huawei is preparing to launch a new Kunpeng ARM Server SoC with integrated HBM. Drivers for it appeared in Linux Kernel couple of weeks ago.

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Linux Preps For Kunpeng ARM Server SoC With High Bandwidth Memory​

this is probably for AI data center I would think, which general would need both Ascend NPUs and Kunpeng CPUs.

For all the ascend dies they got, I would assume they have also procured a huge amount of HBM2Es before that got cut off recently.

 

[gelgoog]

One big question, to me at least, is if the Kunpeng ARM Server SoC will have support for the SVE2 ISA or not. If you read the US sanctions you would think something like that is probably banned. ARM is still an ISA designed in the UK. One more reason why, I think, Huawei would be better off switching to RISC-V.

 

[tphuang]

One big question, to me at least, is if the Kunpeng ARM Server SoC will have support for the SVE2 ISA or not. If you read the US sanctions you would think something like that is probably banned. ARM is still an ISA designed in the UK. One more reason why, I think, Huawei would be better off switching to RISC-V.

IIRC, Huawei has lifetime ARM v9 ISA. And they developed all their own software and cores, so I don't really see any problem.

 

[gelgoog]

IIRC, Huawei has lifetime ARM v9 ISA. And they developed all their own software and cores, so I don't really see any problem.

Yet none of Huawei's core designs use ARM v9. Unlike Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chips which use ARM v9.2a.

From what I understand Chinese customers of ARM used to license from ARM China. Which was supposed to insulate the licensors from the typical US sanctions boondoggles. ARM China AFAIK never got ARM v9.

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[JPaladin32]

Kirin 9000s has four Armv9 Cortex-A510 cores and I have never heard of mixing Armv8 and v9 on the same SoC. I'm still queuing for my Mate 70 pro and I can launch the debug bridge to probe its Linux cpuinfo after I get it, but I'm pretty sure Kirin CPUs after 9000s are all Armv9. We'll see after I get my new phone.

Chinese clients don't seem to have problems getting the latest Armv9 IPs at least at this moment. Rockchip recently even announced they are releasing the RK3688 SoC with Armv9.3 cores, which is fun because none of the existing Arm cores have v9.3, so it must be a new IP.

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[antiterror13]

Yet none of Huawei's core designs use ARM v9. Unlike Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chips which use ARM v9.2a.

From what I understand Chinese customers of ARM used to license from ARM China. Which was supposed to insulate the licensors from the typical US sanctions boondoggles. ARM China AFAIK never got ARM v9.

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Only from Apple A18 starting to use ARM v9 ... so I don't think there is a rush for Huawei to implement ARM v9

 

[gelgoog]

SVE (wide vector) support is less important for smartphones. They often have dedicated AI coprocessors. But for a server chip like Kunpeng it is very important.

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