China responsible for just, oh, 20% of global semiconductor revenue in 2018, no biggie

Semiconductor sales by Chinese manufacturers are said to have reached ¥653.2bn in 2018 – that's about $97.3bn, or around 20 per cent of global semiconductor revenue for the year ($476.7bn). The number was claimed by Ren Aiguang, head of the integrated circuits office at China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, …

[Chris G]

Long term a trade war will not enable the US to maintain a lead when that very thing stimulates the Chinese to try harder to produce sanctioned goods at home while the Chinese are also promoting greater innovation. If America wants to stay ahead it's a case of 'Must try harder'.

Unlike the US, China can also encourage research that doesn't necessarily produce any immediate return on investment while using people who probably would have been conducting research for US companies and universities if not for the limiting of foreign workers.

[rcxb]

Were they still pretending Taiwan is part of China when they came up with those numbers?

[Seon]

I think that's how they get that 93 billion USD revenue number. By including Taiwan in it.

The largest Semiconductor company in China is HiSilicon with USD 7 billion in revenue. Below them is just a handful of big players like SMIC and Unigroup plus hundreds of small fabless companies. Even when combining all of their revenue its impossible for Chinese semiconductor makers to produced USD 90++ Billion in Revenue

[Seon]

China need to show that they can build commercial PC CPU first then we can say they have mastered CPU technology

[Duncan Macdonald]

EPYC

They have already licensed and are producing a derivative of the AMD EPYC design. This gives them the ability to produce x86 processors for their own use if the US decides to impose another embargo.

(It will probably still be several years before they produce their own high performance x86 design.)

[Alan Brown]

Re: EPYC

"It will probably still be several years before they produce their own high performance x86 design."

Considering all the legacy issues with the x86 design, would they WANT to? the only thing it's got going for it is "legacy" and "installed base" - both of which are being steadily chipped away by ARM.

Their homegrown systems are a fully compatible (and fully licensed) MIPS system that does quite well for itself

Lest you laugh, even in the late 1990s, noone was expecting x86 to end up dominating the market to the point of monoculture. It's the least efficient of the CPUs it was competing against in the server market and won on two simple points: price and Microsoft. (cartel tactics by Intel arguably contributed)

[Charlie Clark]

Supercomputer CPUs not good enought for you? The future demand will be in data centres and mobile devices.

[Seon]

Lenovo, Sugon and Inspur mostly used Intel CPU inside their servers. They still used Intel CPU. Intel just blocked CPU sales to a project that has connection to CCP. That's why China need to design their own custom CPU for their top SC systems. It just a CPU made for specific machine.

Its when China can design their own commercial grade CPU without any outside design inferences( like Alpha, ARM, x86, MIPS and RISC-V) is the moment that we can say China have mastered CPU designing and technology.

[Charlie Clark]

Its when China can design their own commercial grade CPU without any outside design inferences( like Alpha, ARM, x86, MIPS and RISC-V) is the moment that we can say China have mastered CPU designing and technology.

That's just a strawman as it's essentially impossible for modern CPUs. But if China does continue to work with MIPS and ARM designs, there's nothing to prevent it from coming up with its own designs at some point. And this will become only more likely if the US tries to freeze it out.

[Seon]

A strawman? That's what you want to think.

If West can do it why not China with more talent than the next countries combine.

[Fabrizio]

¥653.2bn ???

I missed a memo:

When did the Middle Kingdom switch over to the Japanese yen?

[Michael Strorm]

Re: ¥653.2bn ???

"The yen or yuan sign (¥) is a currency sign used by the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan currencies."

[}{amis}{]

Re: ¥653.2bn ???

Pretty much the entire Japanese character set was nicked from china much like English uses the Latin character sets.