Chinese mobe-makers play a long game with homebrew chips

Chinese supply chain analyst outfit Jiwei has suggested local smartphone makers are having limited success with their attempts to create homegrown silicon. Jiwei reports that Oppo pledged in 2019 to spend over $7 billion on its own silicon, and has since delivered a fancy image signal processor and a Bluetooth audio processing …

[3arn0wl]

Other players

For me, the most exciting processors to have been designed and produced in China of late, are the RISC-V family of processors that Alibaba subsidiary, T-Head, announced in 2019. They're now on a SoC - the TH1520 - which is said to have the performance of a top flight smartphone from 2016 : which is certainly sufficiency for light computing tasks. It's said to be coming out in the ROMA laptop, and on a Sipeed SoM (in various formats, including a phone).

There are other collective efforts around chip design too, which are collaborations between industry and education - the XianShan processors spring to mind. Huawei (and others) have also produced RISC-V developer boards to forward the rebasing of software, which is actually what RISC-V needs now.

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Google's decision to make RISC-V a Tier-1 candidate for Android is also going to give the ISA a shot in the arm.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Other players

This does not excite me at all since RISC-V foundation has not cut ties with the terrorist state of Russia. This means it's only a matter of time when RISC-V finds its way into weapons used against us.

The regimes engaged in terrorism, genocide and other human rights violation shouldn't have access to such technologies.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Other players

Ugh. The number of western chips found in Russian weapon wreckage is infuriating. Intel chips are sparse, but the number of TI, Cypress, Xilinx, Altera, etc stuff is far too much.

[martinusher]

Re: Other players

TI make secvo controller chips. Missiles have servos so they're a leading candidate for such parts, especially in older designs. Cypress, Xilinx and Altera are all FPGA manufacturers.

The problem you have is that -- literally -- the parts used to operate missile controls aren't significantly different from the parts used to control washing machine motors. Motor controls are a huge market now so while TI might have had the field more or less to itself its now got innumerable competitors.

FPGAs are a bit more tricky but once again the parts needed for weapons systems aren't the absolutely latest and greatest and are so not the parts that can be easily restricted.

Fear not, though -- as sanctions develop you're going to find a lot more 'foreign' chips in weapons systems simply because they'll be made locally. (Its a huge mistake to think that 'they' lack the capability to make parts -- 'they' would have learned their lessons from the 1960s and 70s.)

The biggest danger we face are ignorant lawmakers that pick up on media stories ("Look, they've got American parts!") who fail to understand supply chains and life cycles. They go stamping all over things, making a whole lot of noise and achieving nothing -- or worse. (Incidentally, TI parts and development tools are covered by ITAR.)

[3arn0wl]

Re: Other players

It seems to me fairly contorted logic that says : Russia is doing odious things to Ukraine, therefore China shouldn't be allowed to use an Open Standard Instruction Set Architecture... (The whole point of an Open Standard is that it's available for anyone to use. :/ )

As I've argued here before : the weapon has no culpability. And if someone is intent on doing something : they'll find a way.

[BOFH in Training]

They can design all the SOCs and other chips they want.

They will have a problem getting TSMC or Samsung to fab them using the leading nodes.

At least till they can get their own fabs up to that level.......

[Pascal Monett]

And, given that ASML is currently participating in the blockade against giving high tech to China, that might take even longer.

[3arn0wl]

It's my understanding that RISC-V is node-agnostic.

China has fabs that can produce chips above the 7nm cut off... And I wonder if the sub-7nm frenzy is just hyperbole in real terms...?

That's not to say that China wouldn't need to expand its chip facilities if it intends to source more processors internally. And how soon before China gains the sub-7nm know-how...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's my understanding that RISC-V is node-agnostic.

China has a small number of EUV lithography machines and supplies to use them for research.

They don't have hundreds of devices and a supply chain setup to deliver inputs in order to achieve volume production and either the financing isn't there or the supply of lithographic equipment is unavailable to address this.

I would suggest that making ~20,000 functional chips per week for a year (i.e. 1+ million functional chips) is likely beyond their capability in the next 2-3 years because of that lack of equipment.

[Will Godfrey]

Don't underestimate the Chinese

They have a very long history of playing a waiting game, and while there's a lot I don't like about their culture, there's a lot that commands respect.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Don't underestimate the Chinese

They played greedy and short-sighted Western capitalists like a fiddle.

[BOFH in Training]

Re: Don't underestimate the Chinese

Yeah that's what I have been telling many people.

Like them or hate them, they (the government at least) is willing to play a very long game.

Probably helps that they don't have to bother too much about what the average people thinks, or have to worry too much about the next election. Or worrying too much about whatever they are spending or losing (in terms of cash/economy).

They decide they want to have X by a certain timeframe, they start to put in alot of resources on it. Be it manpower or material (money). And the way they are doing it, there is a good chance they will get whatever X they (everything except maybe getting Taiwan - that has too many factors that they can't forsee or control).

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Don't underestimate the Chinese

"Like them or hate them, they (the government at least) is willing to play a very long game."

Normally true, but Xi seems to be bucking the trend. I get the impression he wants big things to happen on his watch and he's shown he's prepared for that by changing the rules to stay in power past the usual term limit.

[martinusher]

Re: Don't underestimate the Chinese

Actually, when it comes to the whole "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" thing the Chinese are on the whole doing a lot better job of for their "Average Person" than our government is. That's our fundamental problem at the moment and we only keep ourselves afloat by continually telling everyone how free they are compared to 'them' and how wonderful our life is compared to 'them'. This is currently causing us problems because for a lot of people what they're continually told and what they experience are disconnected so life gets a dystopian "1984" like feel.

If you take the average British person's experience with government over the last decade or two and compare what was told to them with what actually was real you can see a serious disconnect. Brexit is an obvious one -- apparently instead of some nice round figure of millions of extra cash for the NHS you're faced with a dysfunctional organization rife with managerial bloat that's held together by sheer willpower (which despite heroic efforts by the workforce is falling apart). Then there's trade. And, of course, the UK is definitely a democracy, majority rule, "the will of the people" and so on ("Pull the other one"). Anyway despite the obvious people keep repeating what the media tells them, I suppose its a matter of belief because once that's gone you've got......well.....nothing.