OPPO abandons custom chip design ambitions

China's OPPO, the world's fourth mostprolific smartphone manufacturer, has abandoned plans to design its own silicon. Middle Kingdom outlet China Star Market reported that Oppo's chip design limb, Zheku, last week closed and powered down all employment contracts. Difficult economic conditions were cited as the reason for the …

[pimppetgaeghsr]

China slowly realising that even western countries are struggle to create SoCs. This industry due to the culture in tech has very few people remaining that can actually deliver chips and China is not going to catch up without a few decades of practice.

The average YOE in many of these new HW startups is well under 10 and even in the larger companies it isn't much better, the problem is when an engineer hits a ceiling they have to get into management to keep up with their mortage payments and college funds and retirement funds, that leaves very few people remaining to do the work. It isn't 2010 and there is not a surplus of engineers in this field anymore, they all went to computer science and attempted to get into FAANG. Not earning half as much pursuing the art of chip design where you get poor training, grouchy patronising seniors still reeling from the the dotcom bubble isn't as attractive as it once was and the steady crop of MBAs and accountants that unfortunately wind up leading these semiconductor companies don't seem to be very in touch with reality.

These chip companies are at best value stocks and in the case of ARM and others they are trying to convince analysts in Wall St that they are growth plays.

The only hope for a startup in this field thus is to get acquired based on powerpoint slides and a team with a good pedigree (e.g. Nuvia)

[Michael Wojcik]

Blockchain: still stupid

China sees great potential for blockchain in many industries – as you'd expect of a nation that likes to know what its citizens get up to.

No, actually, I wouldn't, since blockchain is an impressively terrible way to surveil people and industrial activity, particularly under an authoritarian regime. For any use case that doesn't involve distributed Byzantine consensus, blockchain is just a really poor design for an append-only ledger.