TSMC certainly "stole" the European chip industry. They had an IP transfer agreement with Philips.
Philips at that time also sold off its crown jewels like ASML and ASMI. This was the time when CEOs bragged about restructuring companies with inane statements like "the company should look like a board of asparagus, not like a board of spaghetti". Journalists thought it was brilliant at the time (enjoy your dinner!).
China and Taiwan benefited from this reckless outsourcing. I'm actually in favor of stopping any European or U.S. high tech exports and further outsourcing.
But it should be on an economic level, not on the silly warmongering level.
RCA also gave their crown jewels of semiconductor technology to what became MediaTek as RCA distracted itself with non-core acquisitions (transforming itself into "rugs, chickens, and automobiles," leading to their decline).
The scope of mergers & acquisitions in semiconductors is mind boggling & terrifying. It feels like there's so much less diversity, that there's a frailty of entirely Too Big To Fail players left.
Yah this is going to have the opposite effect, as it will only encourage China to develop their own EUV stepper and fab development. It might take 10 years to catch up, but 10 years isn't a long time in the grand scheme of things.
Actually it might take them less than 10 years to catch up. I was at ICCAD (https://iccad.com) last week and half the papers were from China. And some of the EDA CAD software is under export controls - specifically Gate-all-around technology used in 2nm and below. Right now the big EDA vendors have developers in China who are making the software they're not allowed to sell in THEIR OWN COUNTRY.
China is basically where Japan was in the 1970s and Korea in the 1980s. Only 10 years before they become dominant in the industry.
Serious interest here. Can anyone else verify that the Chinese don't have the ability to develop and manufacture these chips?
That's stunning. I had no idea that was the case.
Or is this just a, "they don't manufacture computer chips" kind of thing. Which, strategically speaking, is critically different than, "they don't know how".
China can manufacture all but the best chips. They are continually improving, and I don't think anyone has offered a single reason why they couldn't do it.
so in the event of effective sanctions on a country, where the tariff is effectively infinite making the amount supplied go to zero… this should be even better for the country affected?
> so in the event of effective sanctions on a country
That's the point. You can't effectively sanction china.
> where the tariff is effectively infinite making the amount supplied go to zero
There is a difference between a complete blockade and targeted sanctions.
> this should be even better for the country affected?
One causes a complete collapse of an economy (north korea) while the latter helps a nation build up a sector of an industry (china).
China is the top trading partner of most countries around the world. Even with these sanctions. Go figure. It would be like if china banned exports of 'rare earth minerals' to the US. It would only make the US stronger because we'd just invest in mining rare earth minerals.
Tariffs are always good for someone. Just not most people.
Is it good for anyone who wants to manufacture chips in China. Obviously, yes it is good for them. But it is not good, in the short term, for people who want to buy chips in China.
But it might be bad for everyone in China, because someone above implied that they actually don't have the knowledge to make these chips. Not sure how true that is? But assuming it is true, that would hurt everyone in China.
Taking out 95%+ of ledging edge semi that adds trillions to western hi tech and supports strategic industries seems worthwhile. Doesn't have to be invasion, but I'd expect grayscale shenanigans on island power grids etc now that there's less reason to hold back.
>Why does China’s near abroad matter to them? Why do they care about national unity? Why would they want unobstructed access to the deep-water Pacific?
Are questions that answer themselves. But they are the wrong questions.
It’s not China that’s the hostile actor here. It’s not China that’s meddling in distant affairs. This very thread pertains to an unilateral, unprompted hostile action by the US against China. And note that it’s not Trump’s doing. He’ll just do more of it, more openly.
And all of this is very much in line with America’s (at least) seven decades old strategic posture:
I don't feel like China operates under the same geopolitical philosophy as Russia, they have other ambitions that I think are better served by avoiding wars. But who knows given the way things are going.
It's clear if you pay attention, that China's putting inordinate efforts into other places. Africa is one example. (Probably the principal example.) So they clearly have ambitions that lay outside of Asia.
No one fakes moves like that at that scale. They're serious about what they're doing.
A military fight wouldn't serve China's interests. Pouring money into their domestic fabs and using the same market-flooding and subsidies that they're known for in other fields to take customers from TSMC would be a smarter move. They probably wouldn't be taking over the high-end CPU/GPU marketshare anytime soon, but could put significant pressure in other areas while developing capability.
Because war is economically expensive, they subscribe to certain philosophy and would prefer continue trading with Taiwan rather than turning it to rubble.
That being said, even if they would. Under that assumption, I find the idea to further provoke them to doing that morally repulsive. It's an egomaniacal move that disregards Taiwanese people.
The calculation is a bit different for a dictator though.
They won't be affected personally (unless the country rebels against them) so they can be fine to tank the economy if it gets them closer to some other goal (such as megalomaniac world domination).
The US now has an isolationist regime. I think that's fairly likely to happen in the next few years if it is going to happen. Ukraine is also done unless Europe (probably Poland) steps up in a big way.
It doesn’t. But as the Empire’s grip on the world is slipping it will become more brazen, aggressive, openly selfish, erratic. Quod licet Iovi etc. A role Trump was born to play. But, as Europe’s economic woes after four years of D rule should tell you, it’s not just him who’s happy to cannibalize the Empire’s subjects.
The article says: "no longer manufacture AI chips at advanced process nodes of 7 nanometers or smaller." This was triggered when Huawei produced some kind of device with TSMC wafers of this class.
Maybe standard ARM cores are still approved for export to the mainland.
No, unless turning consumer products into data center use becomes relevant at large scale.
There was a time when companies and research labs bought Sony PS2 (and the PS3) to build supercomputer clusters. Japan placed export controls on the PS2 because they had militarily-useful computing power. According to DIA report 4,000 PS2 units had been purchased in the United States and shipped to Iraq in just 2-3 months during 2000.
Were the PS2s shipped to Iraq for computing or just for soldiers to play during their down time? I feel like the latter is far more likely, especially since we know that soldiers had access to game consoles for recreation.
I can't imagine what general purpose software they'd have wanted to run on a PlayStation 2 from 2000 that they couldn't run on a general purpose laptop in 2004.
The PS2 was a state of the art machine with similar hardware of a SGI workstation. Those computers started at 20k. While the PS5 has similar hardware as a low end PC.
If the PS5 had a Nvidia A100 the comparasion would make sense and people would be buying them to create clusters, like they did with the PS2 and 3.
You're being down voted, but it's the truth. PS2 were sold so much below cost it wasn't uncommon to see hobbiests and institutions building beowulf clusters with them.
But these days, consoles aren't sold below cost, and gigabit network isn't fast enough to make cluster computing make sense
Philips at that time also sold off its crown jewels like ASML and ASMI. This was the time when CEOs bragged about restructuring companies with inane statements like "the company should look like a board of asparagus, not like a board of spaghetti". Journalists thought it was brilliant at the time (enjoy your dinner!).
China and Taiwan benefited from this reckless outsourcing. I'm actually in favor of stopping any European or U.S. high tech exports and further outsourcing.
But it should be on an economic level, not on the silly warmongering level.
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