Qualcomm being the only company allowed to sell 4G SOCs to Huawei was a bullshit move in the first place.
The only reason Qualcomm sold so many to Huawei was because the US blocked Mediatek and UNISOC. The US government never gave a legitimate reason why they never granted permission to the competition that applied to supply Huawei.
The US government placed Huawei into the US’s so called “entity list”. Qualcomm needs US government authorization to sell to Huawei and they’re limited to selling 4G SOCs.
The P60 having the SD 8+G1 might be lag from Qualcomm having to make a 4G variant or lag from Huawei transitioning from Kirin to SD SOCs. Alternatively it could just be that the SD 8G2 is not worth the price Qualcomm is selling it at given that Poco doesn’t bother to use it for their best phone, the F5 Pro.
There are no trade restrictions to selling to other Chinese smartphone brands. Qualcomm would collapse if it weren’t allowed to sell to them. BBK, Transsion, and Xiaomi buy up most of Qualcomm’s phone chips and make most of the world’s phones. Samsung uses its own Exynos for the A series phones that make up the bulk of its sales.
A SMIC “7nm” Cortex-A510 core is more efficient than a Samsung 4nm LPE Cortex-A510 core although TSMC 4nm remains incomparable.
The Kirin 9000S is about the same size as the original Kirin 9000 chip, which was made using TSMC 5nm. That implies a transistor density that is closer to 5nm than it is to 7nm.
It is competitive with 5nm chips. Performance and efficiency are equivalent to the SD 888, and better than the Exynos 2100. The Kirin 9000S has custom Taishan cores with SMT allowing it to achieve a better multi-core score than all but the SD 8G2. Still the Kirin 9000S doesn’t quite match the power efficiency of the original 9000 and the custom Maleoon 910 GPU doesn’t have the raw performance of the original’s Mali G78 MP24.
All evidence points to SMIC “7nm” being comparable to Samsung 5nm LPE in density, performance and efficiency.
Even with just auto translated subtitles, the Geekerwan video was incredibly informative unlike the…
Trash article by Bloomberg as always absolutely bereft of any of the technical details that might have made the TechInsights report actually interesting. Instead they decide it’s better to waste the reader’s time by shoving in the useless opinions of stock hawkers, business school “analysts”, and people who are paid to brainlessly toe the state department line. Nobody left with a relevant computer engineering background in the west apparently. What a bait-and-switch, I regret bothering to read it. I can’t stand the slimy way US mainstream media tries to manipulate sentiment.
Before sanctions, Huawei was the world’s largest telecom equipment vendor.
After sanctions, Huawei is still the largest except they barely have any US chips in their products.
The CHIPS act has always been incredibly questionable. It seemingly goes against market forces. The US are alienating what were potentially the largest customers for all the chips they plan on making. Customers are especially scarce at the higher end processes that the US are targeting.
Global Foundries abandoned 7nm since they believed that most of their clients wouldn’t be able to afford migrating to leading edge nodes. UMC barely had any clients for their 14nm process. Not even Global Foundries’ contractual obligations to AMD / IBM, UMC’s connection to Mediatek, and access to the latest ASML EUV machines were enough incentive for them to transition to 7nm and beyond.
The US essentially made Huawei a guaranteed customer to SMIC. EUV isn’t even necessary for 7nm and 7nm isn’t necessary for 5G. Intel 7 and TSMC N7, N7P are made with DUV. TSMC’s 12nm was used for UNISOC’s Makalu 5G modem and one of their 5G SOCs. The delay in making 5G phones might just be Huawei needing EDA tools to design a modem using SMIC’s existing processes.
The way the sanctions are so gradual it’s almost as if the US wants China’s chip sector to undergo import substitution industrialization. It really resembles the slow ramp up of import restrictions that established the automobile industry in many countries. It’s also kind of amusing that in practice it’s the US that are cutting themselves off from advanced tech while China can still by the latest chips. Nvidia made the A800, and H800 just for China… Nvidia probably lobbied to make the restriction easy to implement and based on the specification that affects performance the least.
US bans Huawei so there stuck with 4.5G marketed at 5G.
US bans DJI drones in government so they use terrible Skydio drones for search and rescue.
I’m still undecided if the hype for the 5G AI driven “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is warranted though.
Sanctions really are the biggest own goal.
It would be the LEAP not the PD-14 in the MC-21, if not for sanctions. In normal conditions, it’s a winner takes all market no matter how tiny the difference is every cent counts to carriers. Only the single most efficient engine available would’ve made sense and it turns out sanctions did just that.
The sanctions are the largest boon to Chinese semi tool companies; they were snubbed by big name Chinese tech beforehand. Now, fear and uncertainty of supply weighs down the western competition. ASML in China has been brought down to SMEE’s level; next year, ASML can’t sell anything more advanced than what SMEE can make.
SMIC would have the same issues as Global Foundries did with justifying the investment in 7nm. The few fabless companies in China that use leading edge processes are wedded to TSMC. If Huawei wasn’t there as a guaranteed customer, SMIC wouldn’t have been able to get their investment to pay off. Huawei didn’t even consider domestic alternatives outside of what they themselves make before the sanctions. The Mi 10 Ultra, with a QCOM SoC, had more domestic parts than the Huawei equivalent.
Even advanced engines can’t redeem the F-35 though, it’s still slower than the JF-17.