But China doesn't need state of the art fabs. They just need something that is good enough and is able to satisfy domestic demand.
What's more troubling is that the western world relies too heavily on Taiwan and South Korea to produce their chips for them. Should something happen to these two small nations, the western world could be left with an even greater shortage than 2019 to present.
Except TSMC is building fabs outside of Taiwan. Intel has fabs all over the world and new ones could be built to offset Taiwan.
Of course there is no way Taiwan is going to fall. The USA won't let that happen and I think it's a safe bet to say tons of other countries would jump in as well. I bet India and a bunch of countries in the south china sea are just itching for a fight.
China has no combat experience either and their equipment is... Less than reliable.
I think it’s the “tons of other countries” part that is key. It’s too much for US alone. But China seems to have blown their chance to emerge as a true challenger to the US. They are just too d!ck!sh.
Right. Too many depend on those two to just let the Chinese walk all over them. Never mind the South China Sea in itself is important. Plus currently China has a lot of internal problems of it's own they need to deal with.
TMIC has just now signed agreement with Indian Govt to build a new Fab here. But even that will be operational only after 2024-25 given full n support from local govt.
The fact that this suit alleging Intel infringement of a Chinese patent as to how to build FinFETs suggests that there's some degree of true expertise in the country -- enough that they should not be under-estimated and mocked.
The downside of imposing such blanket bans on tech for countries like China is that they're forced to develop their own tech. The end result is that the US has basically pushed China into strengthening their own semiconductor sector at accelerate pace without massively capitalizing on this period where China was crippled due to the lack of deployed capacity.
Indeed and they also would have been pushing for home grown designs and fabrication by this point anyways. China is closing down and will start kicking any non Chinese company out ASAP. They have already begun in fact but some companies are still too important to kick out... For now.
This all reminds me of the RAM market between 1995 and 1999: due to a fire at a production facility, and most people upgrading to Windows 95 and wanting more memory, memory prices remained sky-high. The RAM manufacturers raked in the money, and invested heavily in new fabs.
As the fabs started to come online, it became apparent that the world now had a lot more memory capacity than it needed. Prices of memory plummeted: some nearly-completed fabs were converted to make flash, which helped kick-start the flash-based disk market.¹
So cheer up, everyone! In two or three years time, there should be plenty of excess capacity, and fabs begging the GPU companies to push loads of juicy large chips through their fabs to make use of it.
Might not be great for the environment, though.
¹ You need ~32 MB of flash before it's reasonable to do journalling on flash; with much less than that, the erase block sizes are too large compared to the disk, so the overhead becomes unreasonable. I have somewhere a 256 KB flash disk for the Psion Series 3: as you wrote to it, it filled up, and eventually you had to copy off what you wanted to keep and format the drive.
> Everything from everyone should be assumed to ship with multiple attack vectors
True...
...but when you're the world's worst government with human rights violations on a daily basis and whose own billionaire citizens disappear for "raging against the machine" as it were, you are to be afforded less trust and more scrutiny than any other "big brother".
Trust isn't a matter of degree. You have it or you don't. Now you may say that it's easier to lose trust in China which is true. But here's the kicker, when trust is lost the fact that it took longer or shorter to get there is irrelevant. So no, there is no "trustworthy" Big Brother. The reason people still parrot the "well the US [or whoever] is more trustworthy" even after the pile or revelations that keep cumming is solid ignorance.
This wouldn't help with ANY shortages and if anything it would make them worse.
First off who in their right mind would buy a Chinese cpu? I sure as hell wouldn't... Hello hardware backdoors and malware how are you today?
Secondly they would be using materials that could be used at better fabs.
Third China has massive amounts of rare earth metals and minerals needed to build fabrication machine's but also materials that those machines need to run.
This would only hurt global supply everywhere but China and only a genuine fool outside of China would ever buy anything from them.
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haukionkannel - Monday, September 6, 2021 - link
Hiw does this affect the raw material shortage?DigitalFreak - Monday, September 6, 2021 - link
It doesn't. This thing won't be operational until 2024 or 2025.Kamus - Monday, September 6, 2021 - link
Turns out, you can't just make state of the art fabs by throwing money at them.meacupla - Tuesday, September 7, 2021 - link
But China doesn't need state of the art fabs. They just need something that is good enough and is able to satisfy domestic demand.What's more troubling is that the western world relies too heavily on Taiwan and South Korea to produce their chips for them. Should something happen to these two small nations, the western world could be left with an even greater shortage than 2019 to present.
d0x360 - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link
Except TSMC is building fabs outside of Taiwan. Intel has fabs all over the world and new ones could be built to offset Taiwan.Of course there is no way Taiwan is going to fall. The USA won't let that happen and I think it's a safe bet to say tons of other countries would jump in as well. I bet India and a bunch of countries in the south china sea are just itching for a fight.
China has no combat experience either and their equipment is... Less than reliable.
Blastdoor - Sunday, September 19, 2021 - link
I think it’s the “tons of other countries” part that is key. It’s too much for US alone. But China seems to have blown their chance to emerge as a true challenger to the US. They are just too d!ck!sh.Threska - Saturday, September 25, 2021 - link
Right. Too many depend on those two to just let the Chinese walk all over them. Never mind the South China Sea in itself is important. Plus currently China has a lot of internal problems of it's own they need to deal with.lutenic - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
TMIC has just now signed agreement with Indian Govt to build a new Fab here.But even that will be operational only after 2024-25 given full n support from local govt.
name99 - Tuesday, September 7, 2021 - link
Intel can't.Doesn't mean China can't. So far they've done better than many expected.
name99 - Wednesday, September 8, 2021 - link
As a followup:Without commenting on the legal issues, this is interesting, no?
http://www.icsmart.cn/47999/
The fact that this suit alleging Intel infringement of a Chinese patent as to how to build FinFETs suggests that there's some degree of true expertise in the country -- enough that they should not be under-estimated and mocked.
d0x360 - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link
Expertise gained by stealing information. So not true knowledge or innovation and that's china's Achilles heel.at_clucks - Wednesday, September 8, 2021 - link
The downside of imposing such blanket bans on tech for countries like China is that they're forced to develop their own tech. The end result is that the US has basically pushed China into strengthening their own semiconductor sector at accelerate pace without massively capitalizing on this period where China was crippled due to the lack of deployed capacity.Oxford Guy - Sunday, September 12, 2021 - link
China would have helped itself to the IP regardless.d0x360 - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link
Indeed and they also would have been pushing for home grown designs and fabrication by this point anyways. China is closing down and will start kicking any non Chinese company out ASAP. They have already begun in fact but some companies are still too important to kick out... For now.Threska - Saturday, September 25, 2021 - link
As this video shows it's not as easy as people think.https://youtu.be/isBYV6QWDIo
Current failures demonstrate that.
https://youtu.be/OZSvDYDfd78
jamesindevon - Tuesday, September 7, 2021 - link
This all reminds me of the RAM market between 1995 and 1999: due to a fire at a production facility, and most people upgrading to Windows 95 and wanting more memory, memory prices remained sky-high. The RAM manufacturers raked in the money, and invested heavily in new fabs.As the fabs started to come online, it became apparent that the world now had a lot more memory capacity than it needed. Prices of memory plummeted: some nearly-completed fabs were converted to make flash, which helped kick-start the flash-based disk market.¹
So cheer up, everyone! In two or three years time, there should be plenty of excess capacity, and fabs begging the GPU companies to push loads of juicy large chips through their fabs to make use of it.
Might not be great for the environment, though.
¹ You need ~32 MB of flash before it's reasonable to do journalling on flash; with much less than that, the erase block sizes are too large compared to the disk, so the overhead becomes unreasonable. I have somewhere a 256 KB flash disk for the Psion Series 3: as you wrote to it, it filled up, and eventually you had to copy off what you wanted to keep and format the drive.
prophet001 - Tuesday, September 7, 2021 - link
No backdoors.We promise.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 7, 2021 - link
Everything from everyone should be assumed to ship with multiple attack vectors — if it’s consumer-facing.If it’s produced domestically for military/agency use the vectors will, at least, be known and the important ones controllable.
Big Brother and Big Sister know best.
prophet001 - Wednesday, September 8, 2021 - link
> Everything from everyone should be assumed to ship with multiple attack vectorsTrue...
...but when you're the world's worst government with human rights violations on a daily basis and whose own billionaire citizens disappear for "raging against the machine" as it were, you are to be afforded less trust and more scrutiny than any other "big brother".
at_clucks - Wednesday, September 8, 2021 - link
Trust isn't a matter of degree. You have it or you don't. Now you may say that it's easier to lose trust in China which is true. But here's the kicker, when trust is lost the fact that it took longer or shorter to get there is irrelevant. So no, there is no "trustworthy" Big Brother. The reason people still parrot the "well the US [or whoever] is more trustworthy" even after the pile or revelations that keep cumming is solid ignorance.t.s - Friday, September 10, 2021 - link
Well said. The're no 'trustworthy' big brother. Why there's still people parroting "US is more trustworthy" is, well, just have a brain of a parrot.d0x360 - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link
Haha got you!d0x360 - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link
This wouldn't help with ANY shortages and if anything it would make them worse.First off who in their right mind would buy a Chinese cpu? I sure as hell wouldn't... Hello hardware backdoors and malware how are you today?
Secondly they would be using materials that could be used at better fabs.
Third China has massive amounts of rare earth metals and minerals needed to build fabrication machine's but also materials that those machines need to run.
This would only hurt global supply everywhere but China and only a genuine fool outside of China would ever buy anything from them.