Huawei's New Mystery 7nm Chip from Chinese Fab Defies US Sanctions
StugStig @ StugStig @lemmygrad.ml Posts 0Comments 18Joined 3 yr. ago

China prepared for this 17 years ago. They launched the "02 Special Project" all the way back in 2006. The companies established by those grants have existed years before the sanctions. They were able to develop the products but selling them was another thing entirely, until the sanctions hit causing a massive boom in their revenue. People forget that it was market conditions that killed GlobalFoundries 7nm effort not technical issues. The same reason UMC gave up on anything more advanced than 14nm. Sanctions created the inevitability of Chinese 7nm by wedding the world's largest telecom equipment vendor, Huawei to SMIC.
It's an amusing coincidence that by the time ASML will no longer be granted export licenses for their 5nm capable DUV scanners, the NXT:2000i and above, SMEE will be selling a 7nm capable scanner, the SSA/800-10W. A machine easily comparable to the NXT:1980Di that TSMC used to develop their N7 process. The fact that the NXT:1980Di and anything less advanced than it isn't going to be export restricted is an implicit acknowledgement of the Chinese capability of making competing machines.
5nm capable DUV scanners, such as the SSA/900 still in development, might be a requirement for SMIC N+2 however as the "7nm" Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the TSMC N5 made Kirin 9000. That suggest a density far exceeding anything any other foundry has been capable of with just DUV, such as Intel 7 or TSMC N7/N7P.
Applied Materials and LAM are less of an issue. AMEC has been selling 5nm etching systems to Samsung and TSMC for years.
TSMC made Kirin 9000 ran out in 2021, P50 Pro was the last phone to use it and the Kirin 820 ran out in 2022. It's only the 5G base stations that still use TSMC made HiSilicon chips.
Being given access to accurate intel is no guarantee that they actually leverage it to form their own views.
There are anecdotes of US officials using mainstream media to spoonfeed them their positions on issues as they can't be assed to do anything resembling actual work.
US mainstream media isn't even trustworthy for predicting the US economy.
They downplayed if not outright denied the potential causes of the Great Recession until well after it had already occurred. They then portrayed the Great Recession "from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business" manipulating the empathy of their audience in order to serve the interests of their true masters.
It's conventional warfare, not guerilla warfare, nor a suicide bombing campaign. The worst case scenario would resemble the Iran-Iraq war and the initial conditions resembled Northern Cyprus more than Afghanistan.
The Ukrainians don't really even have an equivalent to the Viet Cong. Insurgencies need the support of the local populace to eat and operate without being ratted out. Only Kherson is even close to divided enough for that to have a remote chance of occurring.
The terrain and culture of Ukraine aren't like Afghanistan. Afghans are more loyal to their tribes than Kabul. The underdeveloped subsistence farming economy of Afghanistan means any insurgent knows how to live off the land and survive living in deprivation for long and sustained periods. The terrain of Afghanistan allows insurgents to easily isolate whatever forces the government sends in an attempt to control the countryside. The Taliban won without any state really backing them. The overall population of Ukraine and Afghanistan might be similar but what matters most is the demographic in the age range for military service.
Syria didn't turn into an Afghanistan. The Donbass republics fended for themselves for 8 years while the DRA only lasted 3 years alone. Even then the DRA still outlasted the Soviet Union so had material support continued they might've continued on as a rump state. It wasn't like the US puppet, Ghani's regime, which just collapsed immediately after the US pullout.
Ukrainians are more Northern Alliance than Taliban. Their ideology isn't anywhere near as unified as the Taliban's. The moderate liberals and extremist fascists would turn on each other if living conditions deteriorated sharply.
There can be no defeat either. Pulling out would be political suicide for anyone in the Kremlin. Abandoning Russians in Russian territory would be different from abandoning the DRA. Nukes would fall before Crimea falls.
Anyway, you can't really predict the future by looking at the past. The similarities are only down to hindsight and brute force exhaustion of every possible historical parallel.
If the Russians were even half as petty and image obsessed as the Ukrainians are, they'd fire a missile into that trident.
That's based on TSMC's own test chip not an actual customer's. 17.92 mm² is incredibly tiny when SoCs, CPUs and GPUs range in size from 100 to 600 mm² increasing the proportion of chips with defects as the number of chips on the wafer drops.
From that very article
In that case, let us take the 100 mm2 die as an example of the first mobile processors coming out of TSMC’s process. Again, taking the die as square, a defect rate of 1.271 per cm2 would afford a yield of 32.0%.
As TSMC themselves designed the chip, they definitely followed all their design rules for that process to maximize yield. No customer would do that.
Anand explains this in one of his articles.
But have no fear. What normally happens is your foundry company will come to you with a list of design rules and hints. If you follow all of the guidelines, the foundry will guarantee that they can produce your chip and that it will work. In other words, do what we tell you to do, and your chip will yield.
The problem is that if you follow every last one of these design rules and hints your chip won’t be any faster than it was on the older manufacturing process. Your yield will be about the same but your cost will be higher since you’ll bloat your design taking into account these “hints”.
Generally between process nodes the size of the wafer doesn’t change. We were at 200mm wafers for a while and now modern fabs use 300mm wafers. The transistor size does shrink however, so in theory you could fit more die on a wafer with each process shrink.
The problem is with any new process, the cost per wafer goes up. It’s a new process, most likely more complex, and thus the wafer cost is higher. If the wafer costs are 50% higher, then you need to fit at least 50% more die on each wafer in order to break even with your costs on the old process. In reality you actually need to fit more than 50% die per wafer on the new process because yields usually suck at the start. But if you follow the foundry’s guidelines to guarantee yield, you won’t even be close to breaking even.
The end result is you get zero benefit from moving to the new process. That’s not an option for anyone looking to actually use Moore’s Law to their advantage. Definitely not for a GPU company.
The solution is to have some very smart people in your company that can take these design rules and hints the foundry provides, and figure out which ones can be ignored, and ways to work around the others. This is an area where ATI and NVIDIA differ greatly.
TSMC N7, N7P and Intel 7 don't use EUV. It's all quad patterned DUV. DUV lithography has been in use since the 1990s going from 800nm to N7P.
Every single node after TSMC's so called 16nm has been all marketing. It would've more accurate to call TSMC 16FF as 20nm FinFET. This is why Intel brands what they themselves called 10nm as Intel 7 to bring their marketing more in line with TSMC's.
SMIC N+1 has a density of 89 million of transistors per mm² while TSMC N7 has 91.2. TSMC 10FF and Samsung 10LPP only offer slightly more than half that density.
NASA planing to use SpaceX's Starship as the Human Landing System, has convinced me that China will step foot on the moon before Artemis III.
Nobody ever wants a long, protracted conflict but it doesn't mean they don't prepare for one.
They don't go all out because:
- The effective number of a weapon is not the raw number but the amount multiplied by the availability rate.
- Mature platforms have higher availability rates and a larger stockpile of wear parts and ammo.
- The numbers available can sustain attrition for however long the conflict may endure so they don't run out of crucial weapons system at inopportune times.
- The latest equipment may still be undergoing service tests or may have a limited amount of trained crews so any deployment would be more like what Zebra mission was to the M26 Pershing.
- Combat capable forces are still needed elsewhere for security/deterrence and in case South Ossetia gets invaded by Georgia again.
- Mobilizing the reserves would shrink the working population hurting the economy.
- Going all out might also cause a full on intervention since NATO membership isn't actually needed for that to happen. SMO like rules are why the US in Vietnam didn't clash with China as it did in Korea.
Availability rates of the F-15 vs F-35 vs F-22
In spite of how much older the F-15 air frames are, given the same number of planes the F-15s would in combat outnumber the F-35s or F-22s two to one.
Too much of a pain for them to "Remember the Maine".
125 years after the self inflicted incident that sparked the American global empire and yet the modus operandi has barely changed: the same warmongering yellow press, the same fishing for incidents to weaponize, and the same callous use of proxies that are ultimately betrayed.
And what exactly is the definition of democracy are you basing that of?
https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
When asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with some 83% saying the communist-led People's Republic was a democracy. A resounding 91% said that democracy is important to them.
But in the U.S., which touts itself as a global beacon of democracy, only 49% of those asked said their country was a democracy. And just over three-quarters of respondents, 76%, said democracy was important.
For instance, some 63% in the U.S. said their government mainly serves the interests of a minority, while only 7% said the same in China. Asked about whether their country held free and fair elections and offered all citizens the right to free speech, nearly a third of respondents in the U.S., 32% and 31%, respectively, said they did not, while just 17% and 5%, respectively, in China answered the same questions negatively.
And in China, a mere 5% also said not everyone enjoys equal rights in their country, as opposed to 42% who identified this same issue in the U.S.
The Russians see East Ukrainians as Russians.
The US media othered Iraqis and Afghans so much that a certain group of Americans started attacking other Americans that were Muslims and/or of west/south-Asian descent.
The 1990 HDI of DPRK was higher than the Philippines, which is arguably more representative of what a US colony would actually look like when the Americans do not fund a significant portion of the state budget as they did in Park era SK.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they released the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs ("3 Guys 1 Hammer").
It's a pity that Soviet films with well done film to digital transfers and English subtitles are not really something that can be found on Netflix.
The best quality I could find are just the ones that Mosfilm uploaded to their youtube channel.
Panfilov's 28 Men, it's the full movie made by the same people as the "War Thunder - Victory is Ours" short.
English Sub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSozhsNc3eI
English Dub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxKBAXonWrQ
28nm is the nominal resolution of the scanner. The chips that can be made with a single exposure. In that measure no ASML DUV scanner is 7nm either. The physics of 193nm light makes it impossible for any DUV scanner to have a nominal resolution of 7nm. 7nm chips are made using DUV by exposing 4 times at a 28nm resolution. The same quad patterning techniques allows 22nm chips to be made with a 90nm machine.
The name is also misleading 7nm chips aren't sub 9nm. TSMC's 7nm chips are physically 10nm. The marketing names haven't matched for years. It all started when TSMC sold 20nm FinFET under 16nm branding as they believed the addition of FinFET gave it 16nm performance. Then the entire industry adjusted their naming conventions to match with TSMC.
SMIC, Huawei didn't get to where they are by compromising. They never would've bought the Chinese domestic alternatives if not for sanctions. Price doesn't matter in this industry, what they're looking for is the best in the market. This is not the type of capital equipment that subsidies can sell. Which is why when US scanner manufacturers couldn't compete with ASML, they completely failed as economically viable businesses and their assets were sold off.