Comment by general1465
3 months ago
The more USA is going to use this leaver, the likely they will make this leaver useless in the future. Like with China, when they overused chips leaver which stunted China for a while, but eventually gave them a way to establish their own chip industry. Now that leaver is becoming effectively useless. It will ends up same with EU.
The best China has is an internationally uncompetitive "7nm" fab and that's the best they'll have until they can manufacture EUV machines domestically.
So the EUV blockade has absolutely been effective and the fact that the PRC is paying so many shills to convince westerners otherwise just shows how behind they are.
I noticed that people love pointing how far AI field has advanced in a few years and extrapolate next few years. While at the same time being dismissive of Chinese semiconductor manufacturing process. In similar vein I also remember claims that TSMC Fab in Arizona can never work, and yet it does. So I don't know man, I wouldn't underestimate what a billion of enterprising people can do. Especially when paired with the system that has a pipeline of funneling smart people into elite schools.
Underestimating China seems like a really, really, really stupid thing to do.
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[dead]
Okay? There's a lot of chips you can make that aren't the cutting edge. You don't need a 4090 to do AI, as evidenced by all the AI we did before the 4090. You definitely don't need a (random Intel chip) 14900HX to do general-purpose computing, as evidenced by all the general-purpose computing we did before the 14900HX.
For that matter, the 14900hx was already based on a refined 7nm production process, which China already has started using, though maybe not as effectively yet. As you mention, prior to the 4090's 3090 was on an 8nm node, already behind current China capabilities.
If each node provides a 10-15% improvement in power, performance and area, how many of those need to compound until your already uncompetitive 7 nm is 10x less efficient, slower and more expensive?
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You are ignoring the possibility of technological disruption.
Apple disrupted Nokia and Blackberry. ARM is currently disrupting Intel.
What if someone lands on a break-through using a completely different tech: what if X-ray lithography [1] becomes viable enough that they don’t have to acquire state-of-art EUV machines from ASML?
[1] X-ray lithography was abandoned in the 80s but it is being revisited by Substrate https://substrate.com/our-purpose. They are an American company that hopes to make it commercially viable by being cheaper and far less complex than EUV.
Substrate is a scam; their marketing is misleading and they have yet to answer to the fundamental reason why X-ray and e-beam failed over 40 years ago (despite it being generally agreed they were the future of litho and optical would soon be dead): writing one line at a time is extremely slow compared to optical which can scan a whole reticle in a fraction of a second.
E-beam is still used for making DUV/EUV masks where the low write speed can be tolerated but no one in the industry thinks it will replace EUV in the silicon litho steps any time soon.
But lay people eat this crap up and journalists turn a blind eye either because they're literally paid PRC shills or because clicks are everything now a days.
I think you're general point is completely true, but Substrate is a bad example, since the people running it don't appear to be semiconductor experts and it's probably a fraud.
Apart from gaming and llms, most of the chip applications including all of military and consumer electronics is more than happy with 7nm process, whatever that means (proper nanometers those ain't).
I know some people live in the IT bubble and measure whole reality by it, but that's not so much true for the world out there. They have ie roughly F-35 equivalent, minus some secret sauces (which may not be so secret at the end since it seems they stole all of it).
You are making a mistake of thinking of them as yet another russia, utterly corrupt, dysfunctional at every level and living off some 'glorious past', when reality is exactly the opposite.
So, you're saying that China has chip fabrication capabilities which are on par with the world cutting edge as of 2018:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process
not too shabby of a fall-back.
No, they don't.
Their "7 nm" relied on multi patterning DUV which leads to restrictive design rules, more steps and masks and lower yields, which is why I put it in quotes and said it's uncompetitive.
The last DUV node was 10 nm, that's the best logic node they have which is comparable to TSMC/Samsung/Intel's 10 nm.
> that's the best they'll have until they can manufacture EUV machines domestically.
And how far out is that?
> And how far out is that?
These guys have a 100% market share https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems at the 'extreme' end and, obviously, everyone else is trying but haven't really shown much promise.
Here's a good background article on the topic: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/...
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If you ask PRC shills, it's just around the corner because this one Chinese lab demonstrated a very small part of the system. And a surprising number of westerners fall for that crap.
My guess is that it's at least 10 years away, but that could obviously change depending on what resources they're willing to commit. But even at that point they'll be 2 decades behind ASML's EUV tech so it probably won't be competitive.
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So far only one company in the world has successfully accomplished it, so the answer could be "a very very long time".
According to this video (Asionometry - guy from Taiwan, hardly a PRC shill) Chinese EUV are now tested in Huawei factories and should come into production in 2026.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIR3wfZ-EV0
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> the fact that the PRC is paying so many shills to convince westerners otherwise just shows how behind they are.
And yet, it's anti-PRC shills that are all over social media. Go figure.
They can just throw power at it, you're delusional if you think it's going to hamper them even mid term.
My understanding, which is not complete, is China has done some amazing things optimizing training on slower chips.
Which is cool, but there are limits to the number of times you can do that.
At the end of the day, the little man has to flip the switch.
It's directly analogous to China issuing export bans. They tried this with critical minerals. Critical minerals aren't actually all that uncommon. They just weren't being actively extracted in most places. Now many extraction projects are starting to roll around the globe because it has become clear China was willing to use access to them as leverage.
My guess is that China will be highly reluctant to restrict exports of manufactured goods going forward. Doing so would directly threaten their own power base, just as the Trump administration's actions are currently taking a sledge hammer to the U.S.'s power base.
Ultimately, this kind of power is illusory. If you ever use it, you lose it.
It is not equivalent. Rare earths are, as you say, not actually that rare, but they are still a finite resource, and the CCP quite publicly discussed that it isn't a good idea to sell their domestic stockpile internationally while a significant amount of their economy runs on it. They raised prices to factor in that future availability might be more important than short-term profit.
The chip ban on the other hand is about R&D and labor, both things that do not diminish over time. Instead, the ban seeks to slow down Chinese advancement in areas relying on those chips, AI in particular. Both measures will lead to short-term issues, long-term lost growth, and mid-term new industries in the respective countries/markets.
> Now many extraction projects are starting to roll around the globe because it has become clear China was willing to use access to them as leverage.
That happened in 2018 too. All the projects at that time broke because China does it cheaper.
The thing that isn't available in most countries isn't the minerals.
> this kind of power is illusory. If you ever use it, you lose it.
But the threat of using it can tie up a significant amount of your adversaries' resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being
Is that true? I think the "we've actually used this leaver, just once" is much more likely to cause European judges to be extremely trepedatious. There's a difference between sanctioning an entire country and it's most important industries, which will force it to react and fight, and just victimizing a single judge, who Europeans can ignore the plight of.
s/leaver/lever/g
(from context)
I apologize, English is not my first language, so sometimes I am freestyling it.
And perhaps you've learned British English.
It is spelled "lever."
But British English pronounces it like "beaver."
And American English pronounces it like "never."
Don’t worry too much, most native speakers make mistakes like this every day.
Tech is often a winner takes all market, but this will go out of the window if it is seen as a national security issue.
> Like with China
The best example with China is actually their rare earth wolf warrior bullshit. It’s taken a lever that could have been decisive in a war and neutered it.