Strategic implications of Chinese/US AI development

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
Via broadsword thanks for the article
See there are a lot of patriotic Chinese who would do something to advance Chinese science and technology These people take personal sacrifice for the better good of community and country
Eschewing wealth and comfort they trail blaze the technology development of China
US make a Faustian bargain with the devil Now it is too late to abrogate the pact

Some background about AMEC from a year ago published by, oh well, Epoch Times.


Chinese Regime Laying Siege to US Semiconductor Industry


December 14, 2017 By Frank Fang

At the heart of the modern economy is the semi-conductor, and the United States is the world’s leader in producing the tiny microchips. Now China is seeking by fair means and foul to challenge America’s preeminence.

A courtroom in San Jose, California is the latest battleground in this ongoing industrial war. On Nov. 30, four former engineers—Liang Chen, Donald Olgado, Hsu Weiyung, and Robert Ewald—at Applied Materials, an American firm that supplies equipment and software for the manufacturing of semiconductor chips, were indicted for stealing chip designs from their company and attempting to use them to set up a Chinese startup that would compete with Applied, according to Bloomberg.

They had downloaded data, including more than 16,000 drawings, from their former company’s internal engineering database. The stolen information also included details about the mass manufacturing of chips for powering flat-screen televisions and smartphones.

They are scheduled to be arraigned on Dec. 15, and if convicted, could face up to 10 years in federal prison.
‘Zero Sum’ Activities

Chips are the component that powers everything from electronic gadgets such as cellphones and computers, to military weapons like ballistic missiles and satellites. The demand for chips with high computing power has only increased with the need to support fast-growing tech industries such as cloud computing and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

These more powerful chips can be made only with advanced semiconductor solutions, which are highly guarded secrets of semiconductor companies such as Intel, IBM, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), and Samsung.

The United States President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an advisory group, issued a report entitled “Ensuring Long-Term U.S. Leadership in Semiconductors,” in January, just before then-U.S. President Barack Obama left office.

The report warned of China’s “zero-sum” activities to advance its own semiconductor industry, including stealing intellectual property both “covertly and overtly.” One of the covert techniques is how the Chinese regime subjects U.S. tech companies operating in China to security reviews, which the report says can be used to “gain access to detailed knowledge of semiconductor technologies.”

Another Chinese tactic is forcing the transfer of technology in exchange for access to the Chinese market, according to the report. Last but not the least, the report pointed out Chinese companies, with the state’s funding, colluded to lower the value of companies that they wished to acquire with tactical business decisions, before buying these companies when their stock prices plummeted.

These tactics are part of a long-standing Chinese regime strategy of stealing intellectual property. According to a 2017 report by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, China is still the world’s biggest thief of intellectual property, with 87 percent of all counterfeit goods that enter the United States coming from China.
AMEC

While China currently lags behind the United States and many other countries in manufacturing the more advanced chips—its semiconductor foundries are still one-and-a-half generations behind the most cutting-edge processing technology—the report pointed out that China plans to be at an “advanced world-level [semiconductor capability] in all major segments of the industry by 2030.”

Currently, the country lacks a tier-one semiconductor equipment firm, which means companies that supply equipment directly to equipment manufacturers (OEMs), but it does have a tier-two company (suppliers to tier-one suppliers), called Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC).

The report failed to mention how AMEC came to rise in the first place. The company’s founder and CEO, Gerald Z. (Zhiyao) Yin, who earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), used to be the senior vice president of Applied Materials, in charge of the company’s plasma etching department.

Yin contributed 86 patents while working at Applied, according to a Dec. 6 report by China’s news portal Tencent. He later quit his job and returned to China, taking with him a group of more than 30 senior engineers to establish AMEC. Now, the company’s main products are ion etching machines and MOCVD systems—both devices are essential for chip production.

According to multiple Chinese media reports, Yin once made the following comment as his reason for returning to China: “I have only studied so far so that one day I might return to my motherland, to allow Chinese chips to have a place in the world.”
Court Battles


AMEC was able to manufacture advanced etching machines as early as 2008, a move that resulted in patent lawsuits from Applied Materials and Lam, a supplier of semiconductor processing equipment headquartered in Fremont, California. According to the online electronics industry magazine, EE Times, in January 2010, AMEC and Applied Materials settled all litigation after Applied filed a lawsuit accusing AMEC of misappropriation of trade secrets. Lam’s case was dismissed.

In January 2011, AMEC scored another court victory, according to the EE Times, when a Chinese court rejected Lam’s appeal of an earlier court decision. Lam had appealed when a lower court dismissed Lam’s patent infringement lawsuit regarding one of AMEC’s etching machines in January 2009. Chinese courts are notorious for protecting Chinese companies.

Today’s chips are getting smaller and smaller in size; one reason for this is the shrinking in size of electronic gadgets, another is the need for greater computing power: small chips come with greater power and efficiency.

In June, IBM, in partnership with Samsung and GlobalFoundries, announced that it had developed a process for building 5-nm chips (nm stands for nanometer, one billionth of a meter). According to IBM, these latest chips will be 40 percent faster than today’s chips. If running at the same speed as today’s chips, it will save 75 percent in power.

Just a few months earlier, in April, AMEC announced its own breakthroughs in the 5-nm chip production process, with plans to roll out a new 5-nm etching tool by the end of this year.

On Dec. 11, AMEC scored another court victory, according to the DigiTimes, a newspaper focused on the IT industry and headquartered in Taipei. A high court in China’s Fujian Province ordered an injunction against a subsidiary of Veeco, a maker of semiconductor process equipment based in New York, operating in Shanghai. The injunction halted the company from importing, manufacturing, and selling three models of its MOCVD sets, thus barring a key product of an AMEC competitor from the Chinese market.
 
Last edited:

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
Samsung does not make Exynos exclusive to their own devices. For example, Meizu has used Exynos SOCs in their flagship phones for many years.


They had regressed on that policy ever since. How? Ingenious strategy by Qualcomm. Qualcomm partnered with Samsung to fab Qualcomm chips on Samsung fabs. Samsung gets to use what Qualcomm chips they fabbed. That's how Qualcomm managed to increasingly creeped into Samsung's lineups, displacing gradually even the lower to midrange Exynos.
 

Icmer

Junior Member
Registered Member
They had regressed on that policy ever since. How? Ingenious strategy by Qualcomm. Qualcomm partnered with Samsung to fab Qualcomm chips on Samsung fabs. Samsung gets to use what Qualcomm chips they fabbed. That's how Qualcomm managed to increasingly creeped into Samsung's lineups, displacing gradually even the lower to midrange Exynos.

Snapdragon chips are mainly used for Samsung's US device variants due to their more advanced modems. Examining this page, you can see plenty of low-mid-range current phones.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


The reason Exynos chips aren't sold to more outside companies is that their pricing had been rendered uncompetitive due to patent licensing fees to Qualcomm. Samsung has attempted to dispute these fees legally, but dropped the efforts earlier this year when it reached a cross-licensing agreement with Qualcomm. The outcome of this is that Samsung may start selling Exynos to more companies. Apparently Meizu is now including them in low-mid-range devices:
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
 

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
This look like the beginning of the end for X86 chip and Intel vai qwerty

Huawei Server Efforts: Hi1620 and Arm’s Big Server Core, Ares

For at least four years now, Arm has been pushing its efforts to be a big part of the modern day server, the modern day data center, and in the cloud as a true enterprise player. Arm cores are found in plenty of places in the server world, with big deployments for its smartphone focused Cortex core family in big chips. However, for those same four years, we have been requesting a high-performance core, to compete in single threaded workloads with x86. That core is Ares, due out in 2019, and while Arm hasn’t officially lifted the lid on the details yet, Huawei has already announced it has hardware with Ares cores at its center.

Huawei Is A BIG Company
Normally at AnandTech when we discuss Huawei, it is in the context of smartphones and devices such as the Mate 20, or smartphone chips like the Kirin family. These both fall under Huawei’s ‘Consumer Business Group’, which accounts for just under half of the company’s revenue. One of Huawei’s other groups is its Enterprise wing, which is almost as big, and it creates a lot of custom hardware and silicon using its in-house design team, HiSilicon. HiSilicon’s remit goes all the way from smartphones to modems to SSD controllers to PCIe controllers and also high-performance enterprise compute processors.

...And It Makes Server CPUs
Last month, Huawei’s Enterprise Group lifted the lid on its fourth generation data center processor. Part of the TaiShan family, the Hi1620 would follow hardware such as the Hi1616 in being built using Arm IP. The new Hi1620 was announced as the world’s first 7nm processor for the data center, with the Ares cores being what would drive high-performance for its deployments.

The new Hi1620 will feature 24-64 cores per socket, running from 2.4-3.0 GHz. Each of these cores will have a 64KB L1-Data cache and a 64 KB L1-Instruction cache, with 512KB of private L2 cache per core. L3 would run at 1MB/core of shared cache, up to 64MB. On a scale of a consumer Skylake core, that means more L2 cache per core, but less L3. No word on associativity, however. One of the key question marks is on performance: a lot of vendors are hoping for an Arm core with Skylake-levels of raw performance.

Memory is set at 8 channels up to DDR4-3200, and the chip will support a multi-socket configuration up to 4S, with the coherent SMP interface capable of 240 GB/s for each chip-to-chip communication. The 4S layout would be a fully connected design.

IO for the Hi1620 is set at 40 PCIe 4.0 lanes, which is less than the 46 lanes on the Hi1616, but those ones were rated for PCIe 3.0. The Hi1620 will also have CCIX support, as well as dual 100GbE MACs, some USB 3.0, and some SAS connectivity.

The package listed is 60x75 mm BGA, which gives no real indication to the chip inside. But that’s a lot of balls on the back, and the package is larger than the 57.5x57.5 mm design from the last generation. Huawei states that the Hi1620 will be offered in TDP ranges from 100W to 200W, with the varying core count, but chips will be offered that can be fine-tuned for memory bound workloads.

There are still plenty of unanswered questions, such as the interconnect, but we really want to get to grips with the microarchitecture of Ares to see what is under the hood. A number of journalists at the show were predicting that Arm should be having an event in the first half of 2019 to lift the lid on the design of the core.

Code:
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

EjSkILZ.jpg


  • clear.png
    Thanks x 2
 

Skywatcher

Captain
Given that Amazon Web Services is developing its own server chips, and if Huawei squeezes them as well, Intel might not have the financial resources to stay on the cutting edge of shrinking process (they're already having a ton of problems with 10nm, still stuck on 14 nm. As SMIC is supposed to deploy 14nm in 2019, there's the realistic chance that Intel will have the same tech level as SMIC for a few months next year).
 

localizer

Colonel
Registered Member
this is wat happens when u have science illiterate old farts leading countries, they have no idea what they're doing in respect to the tech industry

Attack Google and social media for not supporting the administration... Attacking net neutrality... Results in no net benefit to US.
Obama bans export of server chips to China- Intel loses profit and China makes own- Results no net benefit to US.
Ban Huawei? Threaten to shutdown Chinese tech industry? - China works on making own while US companies get frustrated.


Truth is there is no way to prevent technology from spreading. It might be even wrong to do so. You are only hurting your own companies profits and slightly delaying other countries from catching up.

Also, the US does not have the control it wants over the tech industry. Samsung, TSMC, and European/Japanese firms can match the US.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
this is wat happens when u have science illiterate old farts leading countries, they have no idea what they're doing in respect to the tech industry

Attack Google and social media for not supporting the administration... Attacking net neutrality... Results in no net benefit to US.
Obama bans export of server chips to China- Intel loses profit and China makes own- Results no net benefit to US.
Ban Huawei? Threaten to shutdown Chinese tech industry? - China works on making own while US companies get frustrated.


Truth is there is no way to prevent technology from spreading. It might be even wrong to do so. You are only hurting your own companies profits and slightly delaying other countries from catching up.

Also, the US does not have the control it wants over the tech industry. Samsung, TSMC, and European/Japanese firms can match the US.

When they think nothing will happen to them when attacking China's economy, it's not surprising they believe they will have that kind of control. Right now it's just pure denial. If China is totally dependent on the US/West, no need to be concerned about China taking over anything in the future. To believe otherwise is an admission they're not as superior as they claim. There's no need for China to promise to not develop advanced technologies they fear losing control. They fear a world where they're treated like how they treat the rest of the world right now.
 

ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
When they think nothing will happen to them when attacking China's economy, it's not surprising they believe they will have that kind of control. Right now it's just pure denial. If China is totally dependent on the US/West, no need to be concerned about China taking over anything in the future. To believe otherwise is an admission they're not as superior as they claim. There's no need for China to promise to not develop advanced technologies they fear losing control. They fear a world where they're treated like how they treat the rest of the world right now.

Well observed and said. They hold others to their own standards. They have mistreated the rest for too long and they know they have. So the fear of retribution and justice is strong because they expect others to act as pathetically as they did when the world becomes a more equitable place.
 

sleepy

Just Hatched
Registered Member
To avoid full brunt of US attack, China should develope it's tech industry with Russia and Iran, they have excellent scientists and engineers. Their codeveloped products can be spread out like the red supply chain , replacing out Western ones
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
Snapdragon chips are mainly used for Samsung's US device variants due to their more advanced modems. Examining this page, you can see plenty of low-mid-range current phones.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


The reason Exynos chips aren't sold to more outside companies is that their pricing had been rendered uncompetitive due to patent licensing fees to Qualcomm. Samsung has attempted to dispute these fees legally, but dropped the efforts earlier this year when it reached a cross-licensing agreement with Qualcomm. The outcome of this is that Samsung may start selling Exynos to more companies. Apparently Meizu is now including them in low-mid-range devices:
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

S. Korean government had already fined Qualcomm a big bundle and determined it was a monopoly. That might have brought Qualcomm into the negotiating table with Samsung. China, Taiwan, and the EU has already determined Qualcomm as a monopoly in their courts and have fined Qualcomm, and the company is already under investigation in the US.

Samsung now fabs for Qualcomm, which both companies find mutually beneficial, given that Apple has pulled out of Samsung's fabs, and Samsung's fabs needed work. Samsung is allowed to use a certain number of the Qualcomm chips they fabbed for their own products. One example is that Samsung's Galaxy Tab A 10.1 tablet has been using an Exynos processor up to 2017, 7870 if I am not mistaken, but for 2018, they are using the Snapdragon 450.

As to whether Qualcomm chips are used for their "advanced modems" in the US, this is more likely because a Qualcomm chip in your smartphone also provides "patent protection" for the brand. Try to bring or use another chip, and Qualcomm may sue for patent licensing or have the product banned. Exactly what Qualcomm has been trying to do against Apple which has stopped using Qualcomm modems and used Intel instead.

My understanding is that Exynos does not come with its own modem on the chip, much like Apple's chips. The modem comes separately, and that can contribute to a higher cost, since the modem you would have to use is most likely Qualcomm's. Snapdragons have the modem incorporated with the chip which reduces your cost.

Now how does Huawei fit into the patent wars picture? Huawei also has tons of telecom patents, and is as litigatious as Qualcomm. They also sue here and there, just as much as they get sued. Because Huawei has its own huge patent umbrella, every litigation and counter litigation ends up as cross licensing. It was inevitable that Huawei and Qualcomm would come to blows but equally inevitable what the obvious result would be.
 
Top