Chinese semiconductor industry

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BlackWindMnt

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gelgoog said:
Outside the desktop PC and console market there are other GPU design companies. One example is ARM Mali GPU which is used in most Android smartphones and is designed by ARM Norway. Chinese investors also recently bought UK company Imagination Technologies which designs the PowerVR GPU family which until recently was used by Apple on their iPhones. Then there is Jingia Micro.

No, the problem China has is with the industry of tools and materials required for fabrication. Focusing on something like X86 performance is a misnomer since X86 is growing increasingly irrelevant outside the desktop market. It isn't used in smartphones, tablets, and the high-end server market is increasingly ARM based. Even then Zhaoxin has IP on X86 designs which are good enough for legacy applications.

If companies like Amazon and Alibaba can design their own high end server chips and fab them at TSMC what is the big deal with X86 anyway.
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Ooh this is new for me, you had at the start of 2021 a bunch of GPU startup being funded in China. Moore Threads being the most promising one because them being ex semi guys.

You also have Tianshu Zhixin preparing their 7nm datacenter gpu then there is also Jingjia Micro preparing a consumer gpu at around nvidia gtx1080 a 6 year old design and 2 generations behind nvidia current high end model the RTX 3080. Its not high end consumer stuff but a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first few steps.
 
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gelgoog

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Like I said the problem is fabrication. A leading edge desktop or workstation GPU has a huge die area and must use one of the latest processes. This means you need leading edge fabrication facilities which have a really high yield with low defect rate.
Companies which are still entering the market have a hard time contracting these facilities and paying for things like masks and candidate production, let alone if you need to make your own fab because of some stupid sanctions. Jingjia Micro is on the US blacklist for example.
 
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Tyler

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9dashline said:
The one thing that had been keeping Microsoft Windows alive all these years was PC gaming.... now with cloud gaming/pixel streaming, and with China deployment of 5G, later this decade 6G... the internet will be as fast as the local LAN or even the bus speed of the motherboard itself almost.... Whether its Google with Stadia or Amazon with Luna and even M$FT jumping on this bandwagon, gaming of the future will be rendered entirely in the cloud and then the image itself sent over the internet to the player's endpoint device.... so it will be entirely Operating system and hardware architecture agnostic...

This applies to not only gaming but also other computer applications in general... everything will be Software Defined, business logic reduced to code, and everything will be Software as Service... There will be far less a need for Intel processors or Windows operating systems... and in the datacenter China can run HiSilicon chips fabbed by SMIC with EUV machines by SMEE... Just the Chinese internal market alone is enough to self sustain, they don't need to sell cloud services to the US/EU... but conversely, gone will be the days that China will run enemy operating systems on enemy ('Intel' inside) chips
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It has been difficult to just buy just a nvidia graphics card. Most people who wanted a nvidia gpu probably got it by buying a whole pre-installed computer system. Most supplies were bought up by the various computer vendors.
 
9dashline

9dashline

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Tyler said:
It has been difficult to just buy just a nvidia graphics card. Most people who wanted a nvidia gpu probably got it by buying a whole pre-installed computer system. Most supplies were bought up by the various computer vendors.
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Right up until they start banning the sales of whole pre-installed computer systems that have these cards because lets face it the top of the line right now can literally be used for cooking

Nevermind the fact that the same flagship models (even when just going by MSRP, which barely no one can get it at MSRP these days, if at all) have increased 3 fold in prices (back in 2014 I got a gtx980 on day it released for $599, now the RTX3090 is MSRP $1499) but its taking up like three times the volume (3090 uses all three PCI slots) and the power it consumes and heat it generates as waste output is astounding... this is all to hide the fact that Moore's law even in GPU is dying and so has Dennard Scaling...

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Topazchen

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gadgetcool5 said:

In Semiconductors, China Is In Commodity Hell (Part 4)​

The idea that there is – or will be, any time soon – a serious Chinese threat to American technological leadership in semiconductors is an illusion.

Why then is there so much alarmism on this subject?

A lot of it is due to the fact that so many analyses don’t use the right framework to understand competitive positioning.

Processors

In the most advanced processor categories – high-end CPUs (general purpose processors), GPUs (graphic processing units), and FPGA’s (field programmable gate arrays) – the U.S. share is nearly 100%.

China has less than a 1% share in these high-value product segments.

But for China, it’s really even worse. It is not just the small size of China’s market share. The quality of China’s share is also low. In the CPU product segment –
  • “Chinese CPUs have few civilian customers, reflecting their lack of competitiveness on the open market. China’s large businesses depend on imports for 95 percent of the CPUs they consume. The country remains especially weak on CPUs with the x86 architecture.”
And in the GPU segment – seen as especially important for emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies – the picture is bleak
  • “The United States monopolizes the design market for GPUs. Two U.S. firms, Nvidia and AMD, dominate the market. Intel is also developing a discrete GPU. China’s only significant GPU firm is Jingjia Micro, selling largely to military customers. However, its sales totaled only $36 million in 2019, and its GPUs are produced at the substandard 28 nm node.”
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Stopped reading at "substandard 28nm node"
 
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Weaasel

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gadgetcool5 said:

In Semiconductors, China Is In Commodity Hell (Part 4)​

The idea that there is – or will be, any time soon – a serious Chinese threat to American technological leadership in semiconductors is an illusion.

Why then is there so much alarmism on this subject?

A lot of it is due to the fact that so many analyses don’t use the right framework to understand competitive positioning.

Processors

In the most advanced processor categories – high-end CPUs (general purpose processors), GPUs (graphic processing units), and FPGA’s (field programmable gate arrays) – the U.S. share is nearly 100%.

China has less than a 1% share in these high-value product segments.

But for China, it’s really even worse. It is not just the small size of China’s market share. The quality of China’s share is also low. In the CPU product segment –
  • “Chinese CPUs have few civilian customers, reflecting their lack of competitiveness on the open market. China’s large businesses depend on imports for 95 percent of the CPUs they consume. The country remains especially weak on CPUs with the x86 architecture.”
And in the GPU segment – seen as especially important for emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies – the picture is bleak
  • “The United States monopolizes the design market for GPUs. Two U.S. firms, Nvidia and AMD, dominate the market. Intel is also developing a discrete GPU. China’s only significant GPU firm is Jingjia Micro, selling largely to military customers. However, its sales totaled only $36 million in 2019, and its GPUs are produced at the substandard 28 nm node.”
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China did not make a determined effort earlier, let's say like a decade or more ago, to produce semiconductor chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment because Chinese tech companies were much more content buying them. Only faced with Trump's sanctions did Chinese companies finally come on board with the government's exhortations and accept its extensive assistance and incentives to produce such chips and equipment. The Americans are extremely hubristic in believing that China or any other nation state lacks the capability of producing semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment without assistance of the US. A decade from now, those who have such an attitude will be eating crow...
 
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