> There are other components, such as graphic processing chips used in the security cameras, that are not yet banned for sale to China, but soon may be. Most of the chips are imported from the US, which still allows them to be exported to China.
And here I thought all these components were manufactured and assembled entirely in China already. What's stopping a Chinese company from developing a better chip than Ryzen or Tegra? Not enough R&D funding?
Developing chips is a marathon. AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and company are decades ahead of everyone else due to the fact that they buy what they want and have been building them for decades.
Nothing is stopping a Chinese company from making their own GPU/CPUs (which they are)- it will just take years, if not decades, to reach feature parity. That's not even considering how much work China needs to do to be able to tap out chips at 32, 14, and 12nm
China seems pretty good at 'obtaining' the info they need to give them a head start, plus they're a manufacturing powerhouse with a ruthless determination to 'get stuff done'.
They also don't face commercial pressure to release stuff slowly. Sure it'll take them some time, but 'decades' seems to me to underestimate their capabilities.
GF has foundries in Germany and in the US, TSMC is Taiwan.
Beyond that the only other fab for hire company with an advanced node is SSC and all their advanced fabs are in Korea.
The only thing that China can currently fab on a matching node are display panels.
Their IC nodes are still stuck on 28nm and even that is pushing it.
> Skynet, as China’s national security network is known, had 170 million cameras last year and Beijing plans to have another 400 million units installed across the country by 2020.
Oh wow, what an unfortunate name. Did the government choose that name oblivious to its use in movies, or is this just a nickname ascribed to the system?
It might be both. Like here where .gov nerdy projects will be some long name starting with "Operational" that'll make the pointy hair bosses happy, but when you look at the title and subtitle it spells out Optimus Prime. I can imagine similar games being played in Mandarin.
And here I thought all these components were manufactured and assembled entirely in China already. What's stopping a Chinese company from developing a better chip than Ryzen or Tegra? Not enough R&D funding?