You need to see it from their perspective. "huge step behind" is better than "we have nothing, let's just die". This is the best they have right now, and they're going all in with that until R&D efforts produce something better (e.g., domestic EUV).

It could also happen that all their DUV investment allows them to discover a valuable DUV-derived tech tree branch that the west hasn't discovered yet.

Results are at least good enough that Huawei can produce 7nm-5nm-ish phones and sell them at profit.

A teardown of the latest Huawei phone revealed that the chips produced more heat than TSMC equivalent. However, Huawei worked around that by investing massively into avdanced heat dissipation technology improvements, and battery capacity improvements. Success in semiconductor products is not achieved along only a single dimension, there are multiple ways to overcome limitations.

Another perspective is that, by domestically designing and producing chips, they no longer need to pay the generous margins for foreign IP (e.g., Qualcomm licensing fees), which is a huge cost saving and is beneficial for the economics of everything.

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martinald 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes exactly.

Also to a certain degree you can just throw loads of GPUs at the problem.

So instead of 100k GB200s, you have ~1m of these cards. One thing china _is_ good at is is mass manufacturing.

There's all sorts of caveats to that, but I really think people are overlooking this scenario. I strongly suspect that they could ramp output of (much?) weaker cards far quicker than TSMC can ramp EUV fabrication.

Plus China has vastly superior grid infrastructure. They have a massive oversupply of heavy industry, so even if they hit capacity issues with such gargantuan amounts of cards I can easily see aluminium plants and what not being totally mothballed and supply rerouted to nearby newly built data centres.

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amelius 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> You need to see it from their perspective. "huge step behind" is better than "we have nothing, let's just die".

Yes but that doesn't answer the question of how they got so close to nvidia.

> It could also happen that all their DUV investment allows them to discover a valuable DUV-derived tech tree branch that the west hasn't discovered yet.

But why wouldn't the west discover that same branch but now for EUV?

> Results are at least good enough that Huawei can produce 7nm-5nm-ish phones and sell them at profit.

Sidenote, I'd love to see some photos and an analysis of the quality of their process.

	▲	FooBarWidget 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Yes but that doesn't answer the question of how they got so close to nvidia. Talent pool and market conditions. China was already cultivating a talent pool for decades, with limited success. But it had no market. Nobody, including Chinese, wanted to buy Chinese stuff. Without customers, they lacked practice to further develop their qualities. The sanctions gave them a captive market. That allowed them to get more practice to get better. > But why wouldn't the west discover that same branch but now for EUV? DUV and EUV are very different. They will have different branches. The point however is not whether the west can reach valuable branches or not. It's that western commentators have a tendency to paint Chinese efforts as futile, a dead end. For the Chinese, this is about survival. This is why western commentators keep being surprised by Chinese progress: they expected the Chinese to achieve nothing. From the Chinese perspective, any progress is better than none, but no progress is ever enough.
	▲	hadlock 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		China has been producing ARM chips like the A20, H40 (raspberry pi class competitors, dual and quad core SOC; went in to a lot of low end 720p tablets in the early 2010s) for a while now, their semiconductor industry is not zero. The biden administration turning off the chip supply in 2022 was nearly 3 years ago; three years is not nothing, especially with existing industry, and virtually limitless resources to focus on it. Probably more R&D capacity will be coming online here in the next year or two as the first crop of post-export control grads start entering the workforce in China.
	▲	4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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