They are already at 7nm (low yield, but you gotta start somewhere), and they plan to invest $140B into this. I wouldn’t be so sure about them “not beating Intel” or other such prognostications. 140B _in China_ buys a lot more “trying” than it does in the West.
They also deal with a lot less bureaucracy and inefficient planning process (with decade long litigations) than in the west, at least if they have gvt backing.
That being said foundries are a hard business, there is a reason there has been so much concentration and companies throwing the towel.
Not with $140B in a country where literally everything is cheaper, and not when they know it can be done (and likely also have at least half the technical documentation). It won’t take a “decade”.
Apparently they're working on a DUV 3nm process, which is a little insane if you think about it. Would certainly be interesting to see it working, if it does work.
If we follow Moore's Law, that is 3.5 doublings, wish is a little more than 11x difference. Means you need at least 10x the amount of hardware to get the same amount of work done
That doesn’t seem to hold actually. My NAS/VM host runs 14nm Skylake and I see zero reason to upgrade. I don’t care that the die size is larger - I’m never going to see it. Power consumption is also pretty reasonable.
Intel has bought all the high NA EUV ASML produces until the first quarter 2025 by the way. TSMC is not the west, TSMC is TSMC.
Also China has started investing heavily in domestic AI chips. Huawei's Ascend is roughly comparable to the A100 I think, but you shouldn't forget that this has caused a flurry of GPU as a service company to pop up outside of China that serve GPU compute to Chinese customers.
The best this kind of legislation does is make it a bit more expensive for China to access GPU compute. It's worth remembering that a lot of tech was banned from Iran, but that never stopped Iranians from getting any of those components. It just made them twice as expensive.
