← Back to context

Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

1 day ago

The production capacity constraint seems to come from SMIC who make the Ascend processors for Huawei. Huawei's memory comes from CXMT who seem to have plenty of capacity, with Apple looking to buy memory from them. Huawei then combines processors and memory into chiplets similar to what NVIDIA does with their GPUs.

The reason SMIC are capacity constrained is at least in part because they've been blocked from buying ASML's EUV machines, and are therefore having to make do with previous generation lower resolution DUV machines. These DUV machines can be coaxed into making surprisingly competitive 5-7nm chips, but at the expense of using many more production steps ("multi patterning") which limits productivity.