SK hynix says no Huawei its memory should be in Chinese wonder-phone If The Register ever ran an awards program*, the choice for 2023's Most Disruptive Smartphone would be easy: Huawei's Mate 60 Pro has created a geopolitical ruckus like no other device, now giving South Korean memory-maker SK hynix a supply chain and compliance mystery to ponder. SK hynix is worried about the Mate 60 Pro …
Just a minute there, because China is capable of making a fully home-grown phone, the US is going to impose new sanctions ?
That does not sound very fair.
Is the US also going to impose new sanctions because China has discovered how to burn coal ?
I mean, while they're at it . . .
It appears the consequences of the Russian restrictions have been willfully ignored.
The reason the Russians are such annoyingly efficient coders is exactly because they had to do more with less. While we bought bigger and bigger machines just to run ever more bloated and inefficient versions of Windows (because Intel and Microsoft were totally not in bed with each other here, no siree), export to Russia was restricted.
So they simply got more efficient and better at coding.
I'm guessing the US is really trying to stimulate the Chinese chipset expertise here, because there's no other explanation for the blatantly obvious ban of Huwei because they were simply a lot better at 5G than anyone else, and the anti-Chinese efforts in general.
As far as I can see, the "honest competition of an open capitalist market" is only appreciated if the competition is American.
"I'm guessing the US is really trying to stimulate the Chinese chipset expertise here, because there's no other explanation for the blatantly obvious ban of Huwei because they were simply a lot better at 5G than anyone else, and the anti-Chinese efforts in general."
It's true that the US panicked when China demonstrated a significant lead in 5G, and decided to impose sanctions in an attempt to slow China down and give themselves a chance to catch up.
It's backfired for the US, as we're now seeing. The Chinese have developed a domestic chip industry, and it appears that they've done so faster than anyone anticipated.
But the real looser here, sadly, is Tiawan.
China was TSMC's largest customer. There was an uneasy truce between Tiawan and mainland China, and TSMC was the reason. China could never invade Tiawan because that would hurt the Chinese economy. As stated regularly in The Register, Tiawan didn't need a military defense. Just throw some dirt into the TSMC factories (which would destroy them) and China would suffer.
The Chinese can now make 'good enough' chips themselves, and presumably they'll continue improving. They don't rely on Tiawan for that anymore.
Tiawan: You're screwed.
That's not the outcome for Tiawan I wanted, but it was inevitable once the US forced China to develop it's own chip manufacturing capability. It just happened a decade or so faster than anyone expected.
China's massive expansion of coal-fired power plants DEFINITELY should result in sanctions from every other country on earth.
China has been the world's worst CO2 emitter for years now, they're more than double the US, and it's only going up.
1. China is a huge emitter because it has a huge population. To say that its emissions are 'more than double the US', when it's population is more than TRIPPLE the US is a little unfair.
2. Rightly or wrongly, the world outsourced manufacturing to China. *Our* factories, making stuff for *us* to consume, happen to be located in China, causing emissions there. Those are our emissions, created by our lifestyles. We don't take responsibility for them, sure, but we shouldn't blame someone else.
Step 1 - apply sanctions to restrict China
Step 2 - China develops in-house technology to build stuff it can't buy
....
Step 3 - "the handset's existence may therefore spur further sanctions"
So, no lessons have actually been learnt? You don't actually think that more sanctions will actually spur China to speed up it's local tech development???
the US simply cannot stop the chinese now because they are not the japs, germans or the french who simply lied down and played dead when the US told them to, the US is calling for more sanctions against huawei and china, this is cowardly and dumb to the extreme - “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
We (that's us, the US) are used to calling the shots and having others obey -- OR ELSE. The problem with China is that its a very big country with a very large internal market so the overall effect of our sanctions is similar to reliving oneself against a wall painted with hydrophobic paint. Some say we'd be better off expending our energies figuring out ways to better compete but between entrenched interests and a government that's in the pocket of those interests I don't see us changing much in the immediate future.
Incidentally, the term "Jap" is now regarded as pejorative in the US these days, it can get you -- it has got people -- into trouble.
I don't give a damn about Google services and I'd rather be spied by the CCP since I never intend to go there. So, if I insert a SIM from one of Canadian mobile providers, will I be able to make calls ?
I'm asking this for you know... let's say... erm, a friend of mine.
It will work, but there is nowhere that can service the phone if there is a problem. It is a pity, Huawei phones are wonderful, you actually control them, unlike the Android or Apple products. Unfortunately I broke the screen on mine and I don't know enough to repair it myself :(
YMMV
AAC
Oh the naivety. You might never intend to go to China, but China might come to you. If the data they obtain from a compromised device indicates you are working in a particular industry or belong to certain political organisations, you may well be coerced into furthering the objectives of the CCP.
Given that the performance of the phone's Kirin processor is reportedly about on par with similar chips from 2019-2020, and now this news about memory of a similar vintage also being used, this sounds ever more like the phone has been put together based on stockpiled chips from before the sanctions went into effect.
For something that is supposedly a massive technological breakthrough for China, it's kinda odd that Huawei just quietly slipped it out into the market without a big advertising blitz. Then again, perhaps they didn't have to, since the CCP shills and uncritical western media have done a blazing job of advertising the device for them.
Exactly. Everyone else in this thread sounds like a wumao.
People that aren't kissing Xinnie the Pooh's arse aren't asking the right questions. That this looks like its old stockpiled chips. And if the CCP aren't heavily involved in Huawei as they claim they aren't then why are they advertising for them. This is like Apple releasing a new phone with no advertising and the Tory government instead doing the advertising for them.
Hasn't this also been a limited run which also potentially shows they don't have enough chips for the demand.
There are little ethics in the world today when it comes to trading with China it seems. People just want cheap shit. Huawei are cheap as they have little to no R&D costs due to all their industrial espionage. Hearing people at work talk about buying shit from Temu and pointing out the ethics of using Hikvision as our CCTV provider just got met with a smile as if to say "We're not listening to your crack pot Chinese conspiracy theories" FFS, I'm not fucking Trump or Tucker Carlson. My points are evidence based and presented calmly with the advice to do your own research and you'll come to the same conclusion. But it seems people don't give a shit about human rights abuses when its not happening to them.
Huawei has consistently outspent the likes of Apple with R&D for longer than I can remember.
Its patent pool is massive and it continues to be one of the largest patent filers (even within the US) on the planet.
If they were using old, stockpiled chips, why did they wait until the end of 2023 to use them?
Clearly there is a much bigger picture here that you aren't seeing (even if these chips were stockpiled).
A lot has changed in a couple of years.
Qualcomm announced during its recent conference call that it would receive no further material revenues from Huawei. That pricked a lot of ears.
Now we have the Mate 60 series using self developed chips for the first time in a couple of years.
There was talk of 7nm SMIC success but everyone said yields were poor and costs were high.
But wait, we now have the Kirin 9000s on the Mate 60 series (which is selling out fast and projections are of sales of up to 15,000,000 units). They have just announced the X5 folding phone with the same chip and there is talk of a tablet too. That's a massive amount of product.
I would say yields don't look like an issue at all.
But let's take a look past this release.
At the start of the year, Huawei described sanctions as the 'new normal'. They also said they were moving back to the two flagship yearly release cycle (P and Mate series). Onto that you have to add at least three folding flagship releases (Pocket and X series) and onto that, all the non-flagship phones (Nova series etc).
In just a few months the P70 series will be here, too.
To me, that says Huawei fully expects to be able to satisfy chip demand across the board for the short to mid term. No matter what sanctions might come there way.
Why?
Because the Mate 60 series is reported to be 90% indigenous and every single supplier from that 90% has taken business away from US suppliers (who now can't supply Huawei due to sanctions).
The total of lost revenues for those US companies is 11 billion dollars annually (at a minimum). Those are figures from 2019 so they are probably going to be higher now.
That's 11 billion dollars (at a minimum - annually) that is going to fund Chinese R&D for improvement in its products.
Do you doubt those products will improve?
When they become competitive with those US suppliers on price and technology, they will enter direct competition with them.
First they lost access to their key customers. Then direct competitors appeared to compete with them worldwide.
Let's take just one area: EDA tools which are dominated by US companies. LAM Research had said the impact of losing Huawei amounted to around 2.5 billion dollars.
We know very well that Huawei has invested in the semiconductor tool chain. The entire toolchain. That includes EDA. Let's suppose for a moment that HiSilicon used Chinese EDA software to bring this chip to market.
Can you comprehend the seismic shift that represents?
Even if they used a pirated licence codes to use LAM tools, we know indigenous tools are coming. The result is the same. It's game changing, but right across the entire board.
The same applies to ASML and lithography. It looks fairly clear that ASML DUV equipment is being used for the Kirin9000s but we know that Huawei is filing lithography related patents so indigenous machines will come to market. The question here, is when? No one knows.
However, the thing almost no one is talking about is 'what comes next?'. All we hear about is China 'catching up' to current technology.
But what about post silicon? There is always a very real possibility in these fields that someone stop focusing on 'catching up' and instead leapfrog the competition.
Sanctions have forced the entire Chinese semiconductor industry to double down and come up with accelerated solutions. It's not like in 2018 when they could coast along while still importing foreign technology. Sanctions changed all that.
That's why the Mate 60 series is making so much news. It's symbolic.
I think Huawei moved up the launch date to coincide with Commerce Secretary Raimundo's recent visit. The launch includes several other phones, not just this flagship phone.
>For something that is supposedly a massive technological breakthrough for China,
It is, but it shouldn't be a surprise. We shut down their ability to fabricate fine geometry chips as well as cutting off their supply from existing vendors like TSMC. Over the last couple of years SMIC reported that they had been working on a novel way to make sib-10nM geometry parts so we all knew they were headed in that direction. Remember that TSMC never designed the parts they made for Huawei -- Huawei does this in house, they have all the capability they need in house to design state of the art parts, it was just a matter of fabrication. (Then there was the news about the acoustic filters, another choke point that was overcome -- that was about six months ago, again in the Reg.)
It really was just a matter of time. Expect the process technology to be refined and improved (i.e. yields improved). If you've been following the press at all you may have noticed that they -- the Chinese -- have figured out an improved gate insulation technology. Its all there for us to read about, it shouldn't come as a shock, unless you're one of those people who still tend to regard Chinese people as inherently intellectually inferior (in which case you're in for a very rude awakening).
Very low key launch for a reason, only very few units avalaible since the lauch 11 days ago, the 3 or 4 shops near me have sales paper on it, none even has a mock-up device. P60 Pro or a foldable are the ones your‘e told to buy when inquiring Mate 60.
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