I read this a few days ago, but I thought it was a strange claim, wanted to try to look into myself a bit more before sounding like a fool, but might as well ask here.
The article never actually elucidates how the lack of 7nm chips would prevent “true 5G”.
It sounded like a BS claim because Huawei is mostly supplying backend equipment that would use mostly ASICs right? Why would an ASIC need such small feature sizes?
Most of the sub 28nm process is devoted to CPUs that have far more complex logic which require the smaller features to cram more raw horsepower for general purpose tasks, am I not correct in this? In the case of GPU, it is even more helpful as they are parallelized structures of many identical units.
Since ASIC is a well defined set of instructions, it would only be useful for extremely space or power constrained specialty applications, again correct me if I am wrong.
Even server CPUs are still going at 14nm size processes due to cost.