China has cracked a microchip design method previously only mastered by the West, in a challenge that could undermine sanctions.
Patent filings reveal that Huawei has made advances in a crucial method of chip manufacture, raising the prospect that the company could eventually start making some of the smallest and most powerful microchips by itself.
Huawei has announced a China-only patent on EUV lithography. Which allows production of those 5 nm and 3nm thingies.
OK. We’d expect something between a few years and a decade or more between patent and machine actually working. Around and about you understand. EUV machines are already installed in “western” chip fabs and producing. China is therefore still some years to a decade or more behind.
Panic on nationalists.
At which point, something very basic about technology. Imagine that someone else out there is doin’ summat. Whatever. Sure, it’s nice if you know exactly how they’re doing it. If you can get the plans to replicate say. But that’s not, at all, the important thing. Rather, you now know that this thing is possible. You’re not thrashing around trying to explore the technological edge to see what is possible. You already know that – this makes reverse engineering it all very much simpler. Simply because you now know that the thing, the summat, is actually possible.
No one will ever have an unassailable lead in a specific piece of tech. Simply because the existence of it shows everyone else that it’s possible.
That…
See also: The extreme problems at Intel/AMD/NVidia/etc.. to actually make designs at that level work.. Or if they work.. produce commercially with acceptable levels of failure.
At this level of miniaturisation it’s not about whether or not you can do the lithography. That, in and of itself, only allows you to make the bigger parts with more defined edges. (a Good Thing.)
But scaling things down to that level…. OhBoi..
in blow to Western sanctions
Sanctions are an act of aggression, so it’s maybe worth asking why we’re fighting China and what it is we hope to win.
If the plan is to keep China in its 1990’s box of being the West’s low cost outsourcer, but permanently deny them access to the added value deep end of the technology stack, that doesn’t sound like it’s going to work for very long.
If the plan is to start a war in Taiwan, that definitely could work, but it’s hard to see a realistic outcome to that which would equate to a win for the collective West. We’re already badly losing what was supposed to be a low cost proxy war with Russia, China is a more dangerous opponent and I get the feeling they’re serious about wanting revenge over that “century of humiliation” business.
But we’re ruled by people who want to drastically limit our access to electricity, so perhaps they don’t see the Chinese as their true enemy. I certainly don’t.
The danger obviously is that China uses its fast chips to build a super-powerful AI, akin to the 1983 movie WarGames. Imagine a towering genius, absorbing all intelligence, thinking it over, and spitting out orders. Sounds positively spud-like.
@ AndrewM
42.
The implications and repercussions thereof being more or less the base for a trilogy in 4 ( or was it 5.. ) parts.
– We’re already badly losing what was supposed to be a low cost proxy war with Russia . . .
We’re paying a price for standing up, for sure, but losing? In your wank fantasies.
. . . China is a more dangerous opponent . . .
That’s true in the sense that Russia has chosen to display how retardedly shit it is. The Chicoms might now be reluctant to find out their true status.
Britain’s biggest strategic mistake, post-WWI, was not recognising in say 1935-1938 that a resurgent Germany was our true and natural ally in Europe – capable of destroying the power of France, our greatest imperial rival, but without threatening our own overseas Empire. Moreover, only Germany had a chance of halting the otherwise inevitable rise of Russia given that country’s territorial and resource advances (but would sorely have needed our assistance in doing so) while economically only an Anglo-German technological and industrial alliance could have kept us ahead of America.
Okay so Hitler hated Jews, Gypsies and Slavs – but how many of them were British? If he carved out Lebensraum in Poland and Russia, the only effect of that on Britain would have been the positive one of bringing new resources and population into Western markets while removing the Great Game threat to our own power in Asia. Clearly Hitler would not treat the existing population with kidgloves and flowers, and clearly he was “guilty” of “racism”, but we were running an Empire at the time too so we should have had at least some understanding of the practicalities. The European domination of the world could have continued for at least another century, and with the French knocked out of the picture then we would have been left running the greater part of it. An extraordinary opportunity lost just because a bunch of naifs decided Hitler was a “Bad Man” and therefore Germany must be our “enemy”.
Our second biggest mistake, one which we should have cottoned on to by 1944 and certainly by 1946, was that clinging to our Atlantic “cousins” was going to doom us to generation upon generation of cultural, economic and political subjugation. Britain deserved more than to be a U.S. Mini-Me. And the way to have avoided that fate would have been to correctly identify the natural complementary ally for our geostrategic needs: Russia. Once again we seem to have ended up with Russia as our “enemy” because the faint-hearted disliked the economic and political system there, but that should never be the basis you choose your allies on. You are picking a partner whose needs, abilities and ambitions form a good match for your own, not the country you most want to be like. And ironically we seem to have ended up with them as our “enemy” precisely because a left-wing government wanted to prove it was not too left-wing and went from a sensible stance of opposing domestic communism to a ridiculous and costly stance of international “anti-communism”!
But why should the domestic system in Russia be of any concern to us? Stalin would have brought land and resources to the table, while we brought technology and overseas reach through the Empire and Navy. If Britain had acted to ensure Reconstruction in Western Europe led to it joining the Soviet-aligned bloc (defeating CIA rigging the Italian elections, ensuring the US proxies lost the Greek civil war etc) then we would have ended up with a UK + Europe + Russia + China bloc that would have formed a strong and effective counterweight to US power. Unlike the Yanks, Russia would never have culturally subjugated us (they didn’t control English-language mass media, the Soviet Hollywood was primarily for Soviet consumption) and while Soviet troops in continental Europe would have kept the Germans and French down, to Britain’s advantage, their hold over us would have been much more tenuous. That would have allowed us to negotiate a fair price for entry into the alliance – whereas the US dictated terms, crippled us financially and demanded we shed the Empire. Post-1945 it may have been too late to save India, but I suspect for all the anti-imperialist sloganeering that Stalin would have approved us holding much of the rest of the Empire as an overseas bulwark against the Americans. The critics of Stalin can wibble “Holodomor, ethnic deportations, gulags, blah blah blah” but none of those things was going to come to Britain. By siding with America, we ensured wave after wave of Hollywood cultural corruption, Political Correctness, Woke and other mindviruses have thoroughly infected us.
Now we seem to be on the brink of making our third great mistake. Who now can provide the best counterweight to the USA and potentially, as a future threat, the EU? The obvious answer is China but just because a bunch of Woke NGOs have rude words to say about Chinese policy in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong etc suddenly we are supposed to see a billion people, and a massive market, as an “enemy”. An allied outpost in the Europe/Atlantic region would be very valuable to China and there is good potential for us to extract a worthwhile price. Frankly I don’t care what they do domestically but ensuring there is a Han Chinese majority in Tibet and Xinjiang just seems like an obvious and sensible policy to me. The efforts they’ve gone to in order to remove the mindviruses of nationalist separatism and islamism are things we could be learning from, frankly.
A lot of the anti-Chinese propaganda wibbles on about “social credit” scoring, governments being able to routinely read what’s on your phone and computer (oh by the way hello Edward Snowden, not at all like anything like that happens here is it?), the Great Firewall keeping unwanted ideas out, AI-powered CCTV camera that can identify and track people through a city … to which all I can say is Bring. It. On. At one level this is all just tech, and tech will inevitably march on. Best get to the future sooner rather than later. But more importantly: what’s the alternative? I read a lot of stuff from the so-called “Alt-Right”, “Post-Liberals”, “Culture Warriors” etc, but I have not once seen any of them propose an actual solution to cleansing our own mindviruses – whether that’s imported US Wokism, or Celtic separatism, or our own inner-city versions of China’s Xinjiang problem. Appointing a slightly different set of people to sit on the boards of quangos and universities just isn’t going to cut it. Independent producers making non-Woke films and posting them on a google-free clone of Youtube means a few thousand views and mere pennies of ad revenue. If we’re fighting a War of Ideas, we need to wage a Total War: and that means controlling which ideas are allowed to enter the battlefield, by policing what ideas are allowed to get here (China can sell us the tech for the Great Firewall but there’s no need to clone it: the Brit Wall can be customised to our own situation), who’s allowed to spread them (deep dives into the social media content of our Liberal “betters” is instructive enough already – but imagine being able to do it with the assistance of AI plus access to content they shared “privately” with friends and co-spreaders of ideological cancer) and tight control over the platforms ideas spread on (we need a British WeChat to replace America’s hold over our social media and broadcasting platforms). If time in a re-education camp is an alternative option – and they do seem to have been successful at curbing unrest in Xinjiang and elsewhere – we may even be able to regain control ideologically over the universities. If that fails we can always turn them into reeducation camps: after all, that’s what the Left has been doing for decades to our youngsters. It’s very much time we mad the Left taste their own medicine: and ironically, with the help of Chinese Communists, rather than Yankee Capitalists, finally we can.
The particularly brilliant thing is that with a sensible government in place (and with this technological assistance, finally guaranteed to continue in office indefinitely) there’s no way any of this could possibly backfire on us, at all.
@PJF
Depends what you define as losing.
Sure, Russia is taking more military losses than NATO.
We’re facing sky high energy bills and all sorts of associated economics woes.
We’ve also spunked all our stored military kit on blowing up a few Russian tanks, it will take years to replenish and cost billions. (Win for the arms companies, loss for taxpayer).
No score draw perhaps?
Maybe China feels a bit emboldened, now that we’ve fired all our spare munitions at Russia. They’ll know we haven’t got any left to fight a war a long way away.
Maybe that was the deal between Russia and China? Russia goes first, absorbs the munition stockpile. China goes second, because it’s facing a harder problem (beach landings). China agrees to buy Russian oil and they become good trading partners.
Meh, I’ll sit this war out as much as possible. And hope that the giant mushrooms don’t start popping up.
Patents are ten a penny, especially if the body granting them is politically driven.
China has a lot of experience in building semiconductor devices, a lot od experience packaging them, a lot of experience whacking them onto ‘boards’, and a lot of experience whacking said boards into product. And cheaply. Given that – IIRC – the only vendor of EUV machinery is European, China will have to develop their own machinery, which will cost time and money.
So their effective advantage over the west will continue (the west can’t afford – it thinks – to build semiconductor devices, package them, put them on boards and put those in products – it does those things in China).
It’s true China won’t be able to immediately effectively tackle the smaller very advanced nodes, but it’s increasingly clear that to some large extent these are dick-waving contests – nowadays you can glue a dirt-cheap 22nm die on top of a high volume 7nm die and get something relatively cheap for about the power and performance of a 3-5 nm die – because all real chips have lots of logic and lots of SRAM; and you could standardize on the 7nm SRAM and build bigger but still very quick 16-22nm logic and connect ’em with through-silicon vias. [this is a component of the ‘chiplet revolution].
And right now – in my estimation – the giant x86s etc are far too bloody complicated and don’t deliver useful bang for the buck, sqmm or $. [That’s why you see GPUs and neural accelerators etc] So it’s about time the industry shifted away from its addiction to 40 year old computer architecture (tuned for the tech of the 1980’s and hardly changed since – qv RISC-V) and started looking at what fits the physical reality of today’s and tomorrow’s silicon.
…but of course doing this will make it easier for China (or India, or even the UK) to follow.
As Tim notes, once you’ve shown it works, it’s much easier to copy.
Perhaps our governments should take their eyes off slave reparations, central control, wokesterism, giving money to feckless persons, encouraging the ruin of third world countries, funding treasonous universities, and concentrate on making it easier for people and groups of people to make ideas and stuff, and to profit greatly from successful ones…
Andrew M
Yeah, a super powerful AI that can even more quickly decide that a bird-poop-smeared Stop sign is a speed limit sign. Or vice versa.
These machines really are not as clever as the baying mob supposes. That goes for GPT3-based systems too – just played with one (sudowrite) and quelle surprise: it not only writes bad sentences, it gets basic facts wrong. [True, there is a label on the can which says ‘check any facts’, so…]
These things are trained pattern recognizers, not Artificial Intelligences.
Pattern recognition is useful; it’s what a portion of your retina seems to do. Classification is useful; it’s what a tiny proportion of the rest of your vision system seems to do. There’s still the rest of the brain to approximate….
As Grikath says in the first reply, the engineering for the advanced stuff is really hard.
There’s an excellent analysis of the Chip Wars here or on most podcast platforms.
https://www.theredlinepodcast.com/post/episode-81-the-geopolitics-of-microchips-and-semiconductors
Excellent satire there!
– We’re facing sky high energy bills and all sorts of associated economics woes.
Well yes, there’s the aforementioned cost of standing up (and to be fair, we’d already imposed most of those costs on ourselves). Inevitably the costs of not standing up are left in the disputable mists of what-ifs; I’m settled that the costs risked being too high.
– We’ve also spunked all our stored military kit on blowing up a few Russian tanks, it will take years to replenish and cost billions.
No we haven’t; we’ve demonstrably retained most of it. And most of what we have sent was stuff coming to the end of its shelf life – so was destined to be scrapped unused and would still have needed to have been replaced. We’ve yet to send a single vaguely modern battle tank or fighter jet to Ukraine. Whatever will we do without our fleet of five-year-retired Sea King helicopters?
Assisting Russia in its profound self-diminishment like this is cheap. If we end up with a more amenable regime there it will have been an absolute bargain.
PJF – I was reading about Deng Xiaoping for shits n gigs. He was a very interesting man, basically the Chinese Napoleon if you ask me – though his fight was bureaucratic and internal, it was no less consequential.
And unlike everybody’s favourite Italian Frenchman, Deng Xiaoping won. Both personally and politically. After all the terrible, skull-strewn harm 20th century Parisian academia did to Indo-China, it seems only fair.
Anyway, he said:
The essence of socialism is liberation and development of the productive forces, elimination of exploitation and polarisation, and the ultimate achievement of prosperity for all. This concept must be made clear to the people.
Now, the interesting bit is, he meant it. Actually wildly overdelivered on his promises, massive increase in ordinary Chinese prosperity and living standards under his watch. The unpleasantness and cannibalism of the Cultural Revolution was also mercifully discouraged.
Every single Western leader in 2023 is promising to greatly reduce the living standards of their hostage populations. Signed solemn and binding (no laughing, please) treaties to that effect, in fact. Figuratively lined up to kiss the ring of Sweden’s ugliest Down Syndrome actress while swearing jihad against you and me, and our petty little hopes and dreams of not being poor.
What does it mean when we’re ruled by people who are literally worse than Deng Xiaoping? When we would, in fact, be considerably better off under the gang of crooks in Beijing than we are under the gang of crooks in London?
Idk, but shaking your fist at your imaginary enemies in Muscovy and Peking while your real enemies pick your pocket and ration your standard of living seems a bit daft to my mind.
Happy New Year.
– Now, the interesting bit is, he meant it.
Mindreading doesn’t work; mindreading the dead double plus no workie.
. . . wildly overdelivered on his promises, massive increase in ordinary Chinese prosperity and living standards . . .
By adopting market capitalism rather than socialism. So much for meaning it.
– What does it mean when we’re ruled by people who are literally worse than Deng Xiaoping?
Not much, apparently; for rather than do anything about it you just whine snarkily in blog comments. Having shit leaders doesn’t rule out external dangers. Rome and Mexica fell to invaders, not their vile and corrupt rulers who’d been vile and corrupt for centuries. Turns out the barbarians and Spanish weren’t imaginary.
Happy New Year to you too, though I suspect you’ll continue to indulge in wallowing in despair.
Anon, have you considered that the UK could also have allied with the 2nd Reich before WW1? The French colonies would have been stolen by the Germans to fulfil their Weltpolitik dreams, and one imagines that Ludendorff would have also seized the Ukraine to provide additional lebensraum in the east.
As for dear old Dung, Steve he certainly seems to have done a better job than Xi. But since we’re carrying out the woke dream of shutting down our coal burners here in Oz and will no doubt be soon wailing for Chinese assistance, perhaps I shouldn’t sink the boot into Xi too far.
Well yes, there’s the aforementioned cost of standing up (and to be fair, we’d already imposed most of those costs on ourselves). Inevitably the costs of not standing up are left in the disputable mists of what-ifs; I’m settled that the costs risked being too high.
It’s not a question of ‘what if’, more a question of was it worth it?
House of Commons report puts assistance to Ukraine at £2.3 bn as of December and is pledged to match it in 2023
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9477/
So by the end of next year, we’ll have spunked £4.6bn on blowing up a few Russian tanks. Great. (Sarc).
Could that money have been better spent? Probably.
Or, here’s a revolutionary idea, how about we don’t spend it, cos we have to borrow it, and reduce the future tax burden on our struggling taxpayers.
In case you haven’t guessed, I’m not convinced spending loads of money and risking us getting dragged into a war to satisfy the urges of politicos to strut and preen about the world is worth it.
No we haven’t; we’ve demonstrably retained most of it. And most of what we have sent was stuff coming to the end of its shelf life – so was destined to be scrapped unused and would still have needed to have been replaced.
All was hyperbolic for effect. Thought that might have been obvious, but things get lost when communicating in type.
Still a decent proportion of missiles and material, particularly NLAWs, as per the aforementioned report.
We’ve yet to send a single vaguely modern battle tank or fighter jet to Ukraine.
Thank fuck. Somebody still has a brain. We don’t really want a shooting war with Russia do we?
Whatever will we do without our fleet of five-year-retired Sea King helicopters?
Probably nothing. Hope we sold them to the Ukrainians for a good price.
Assisting Russia in its profound self-diminishment like this is cheap.
If £2.3bn (to date) is cheap, I’d hate to see expensive…
If we end up with a more amenable regime there it will have been an absolute bargain.
Pretty big if there.
It’s entirely possible we end up with a more hard line regime and end up with and even more costly war, both in terms of lives and money.
End of this year even.
Happy New Year everyone!
PJF – Mindreading doesn’t work; mindreading the dead double plus no workie.
But we don’t need to read the guy’s mind.
Bboy – making nice with Xi would probably be a lot less expensive than buying a small number of eye wateringly expensive nuclear submarines is going to be.
CD – the bills for Ukraine have only just begun. Place is completely fucked now, and will be dependent on multi-billion pound transfers every month for the foreseeable.
Russia isn’t going to change its mind, because contra every single MSM report this isn’t “Putin’s war”, Russia isn’t a one man band, and they’re not going to helpfully dissolve (again) into a number of feuding successor states like the CIA wants. If Putin became dangerously sad and fell out of a window, his replacement would probably be a lot more aggressive.
In all likelihood, we’ll cut and run from Kiev much as we did from Kabul. Then, I suppose, the focus will switch to annoying the Chinese over Taiwan, and people will forget they’re supposed to be angry at Russia as soon as they’re told to be angry at Chinamen instead.
But the West is running out of road. 100 years ago, we had enormous technological, social, economic and demographic advantages over the fuzzy wuzzies which we could and did use to reshape the world. Those advantages have all been pissed away, but our leaders are still behaving as if they still run the world.
They’ll find out the hard way.
They’ll find out the hard way.
I’m just praying we don’t have to find out with them when the rockets start flying.
Maybe, maybe not, but seeing the looks on the faces of the frogs would be worth it at twice the price! (Especially if its the Oz taxpayers paying!)
@Chernyy Drakon – January 1, 2023 at 10:02 am
So by the end of next year, we’ll have spunked £4.6bn on blowing up a few Russian tanks.
Put it in perspective… That £4.6bn could be used to build another 3 miles of HS2 (slightly less actually).