A reappraisal of China's semiconductor strategy

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PikeCowboy

Junior Member
If Huawei downgrades its 7nm chips to 14nm, what is the expected reduction to the performance of its phones from a user standpoint? Is it barely noticeable, clearly noticeable but still competitive, or does it severely handicap the phone rendering it non-competitive?

iphone 10 vs 6s, you probably cant use anemojis...
maybe it has a bigger impact on networking equipment and 5g
 

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
iphone 10 vs 6s, you probably cant use anemojis...
maybe it has a bigger impact on networking equipment and 5g
OK thanks. Did you give that answer simply because iphone10 uses 7nm and iphone 6s used 14nm? Because if that's the reason, then I don't think it is necessarily correct as there are so many other upgrades from 6s to 10 that would also boost performance (I assume).

I don't know what an anemoji is but it sounds like all the girls need it LOL
 

tidalwave

Senior Member
Registered Member
If Huawei downgrades its 7nm chips to 14nm, what is the expected reduction to the performance of its phones from a user standpoint? Is it barely noticeable, clearly noticeable but still competitive, or does it severely handicap the phone rendering it non-competitive?

,roughly 20% performance reduction. Just lower the price.
 

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
,roughly 20% performance reduction. Just lower the price.
If that's true then that's not bad at all. Most cellphones are way overpowered these days for what people need. I'm surprised they haven't switched to SMIC already. All that extra revenue from Huawei would be a huge boost and could help improve SMIC's chips so that they can catch up to TSMC. Plus I'm think SMIC could offer better prices as well.
 

Max Demian

Junior Member
Registered Member
If Huawei downgrades its 7nm chips to 14nm, what is the expected reduction to the performance of its phones from a user standpoint? Is it barely noticeable, clearly noticeable but still competitive, or does it severely handicap the phone rendering it non-competitive?

Current SMIC capacity at 14nm is very low and woefully incapable of meeting the demands of Huawei alone. It will likely take them several years of growth and purchasing of sensitive foreign tools and equipment to reach the capacity presently available at TSMC/Samsung/GlobalFoundries. In reality, Huwaei would have go several more nodes down, all the way to 28nm. That would put them at about 2013ish performance level at best.
 

s002wjh

Junior Member
whats hauwei gonna do with SD card now? this is another big hit

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Huawei can’t officially use microSD cards in its phones going forward

The effects of the
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continue to grow, with the Chinese hardware company now barred from being a member of the
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(the trade group that agrees upon standardized specs for SD and microSD cards). In other words, Huawei is no longer allowed to put official SD or microSD card support in its future phones or laptops,
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.

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that Huawei’s removal from the group was due to
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, making it the the latest blow to the besieged Chinese company as the result of that ban. MicroSD cards and SD cards will continue to work on existing Huawei hardware, but being barred from the SD Association means that Huawei won’t be able to use the standards on future products.

The SD Association is also by no means the first to cut ties:
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,
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,
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are also among the companies that have stopped working with Huawei due to the ban. The Wi-Fi Alliance (which sets Wi-Fi standards across the industry) has also “temporarily restricted” Huawei’s membership due to the US ban, and Huawei has also voluntarily left JEDEC (a semiconductor standards group best known
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) over the issues with the US as well, according to
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Review. All this could severely hamper Huawei’s ability to produce hardware at all, much less compete in the US technology market.
 

s002wjh

Junior Member
Huawei introduced a proprietary memory standard called Nano Memory back in 2018 with the Mate 20 series (
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).
yea but it need get cheap and has same performance as microSD though. maybe other chinese company can help with that, if most chinese/india etc phone use nano memory price will go down.
 

gelgoog

Brigadier
Registered Member
China should not repeat the same mistake that the Japanese did.By signing Plaza accord Japan unwittingly condemn their semiconductor industry to death by forcing industry to buy american semi. Here is a good article revisiting plaza accord and compare it to present dispute between China and US. Hard as it is China should not give up supporting the semiconductor industry by agreeing for numerical import target
...

With regards to Japan in the 1980s there are several differences. One, like said in the article, Japan was reaching its peak economic performance and went down after converging because of an ageing population. I have examined the numbers of Japan's economy several times and, to be honest, their economy to me seems to be more constrained by their need for energy imports than anything else. Japan also went down the path of getting into memory products and then lost that same business to the South Koreans. But they never went much further up the semiconductor market than that. For several reasons. I think one of the reasons is they have a much smaller software market. No one else speaks their language and it is really difficult to convert software in their language to other languages. That is why, in my opinion, you saw their success mainly in the console market. Most computer games require little in the way of text translation and those which did, like RPGs, initially had much more difficulty entering the Western markets because of that. They did have efforts in the personal computer sector, like MSX, but they were failures.

The USA clearly kneecapped the Japanese supercomputer industry though. Their lawsuits against NEC in the US are legendary and were only stopped when Cray became an importer of NEC supercomputer hardware. Then there are the issues with patents. At one time Japanese vendors produced Intel X86 clones for example but they never went far into it because of patents. In many ways China has the same issues. The main difference is China has a much larger population which in itself is larger than the entire North America, Western Europe, and Japan back then if you think about it. So there is no reason why China can't have its own market. Thing is, today India is also part of the global software market. So China needs to find a way to still be globally competitive.

I think Japanese computer chip development basically peaked around the time the Sega Saturn was developed. That console used basically mostly Japanese developed components including the CPU. Ever since then though Japanese consoles increasingly used US chip designs and that, I think, is quite sad. The main reason was, I think, because of the lag between leading edge processor chip factories in Japan and the US. Added to a much smaller native CPU market it meant they did not retain CPU designers since they could not afford them as processor designs became more complex.

Still, I think it is kind of sad that all modern Japanese consoles use basically US designed SoCs.

One thing Japan had in the 1980s which China did not have was a robust semiconductor tools industry. They had two major tools vendors back then. That's basically how they could get as far in the memory business as they did I think.
 
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