New phone sparks worry China has found a way around U.S. tech limits
New phone sparks worry China has found a way around U.S. tech limits
Huawei, which has been under U.S. sanctions for years, released the phone pointedly during Gina Raimondo’s visit to Beijing
“The major geopolitical significance has been to show that it is possible to completely design [without] U.S. technology and still produce a product that may not be quite as good as cutting edge Western models, but is still quite capable.” Miller says a considerable gap remains between SMIC’s capabilities and those of TSMC, the industry leader that produces the newest chips for companies like Apple.
I’m not sure why anyone ever thought these sanctions were going to stop China from making their own chips. There are over a billion people in China. Of course they’re going to be capable of designing their own chips.
Because they sniff their own farts regularly.
What a lot of people don't realize is that digital wireless communictaion is so incredibly complex that very very very few companies in the world can even design them let alone manufacture them. One of the mechanisms used to prevent the proliferation of this knowledge is the spectrum regime. Because normal people are not allowed to use spectrum they don't own, it becomes very difficult for them to engage in experimental development. This means you need experiments to happen in institutions. And those institutions can't use spectrum they don't own either. So companies buy up spectrum licenses and then fund the research and development and then privatize the results and keep it locked away.
Imperialists think this is going to keep the pace of innovation within their control. And they were right for a good long while. We still don't have open-source firmware for chips that work on even Part 15 unlicensed spectrum, let alone on chips with proprietary designs.
If you're currently working for a US semiconductor company, I'm sure there are Chinese companies that would be happy to hire you with a very sizable raise...
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The major geopolitical significance,” he said, “has been to show that it is possible to completely design [without] U.S. technology and still produce a product that may not be quite as good as cutting edge Western models, but is still quite capable.”
China’s official broadcaster, CGTN, in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, called the phone Huawei’s “first higher-end processor” since U.S. sanctions were imposed and said the chip it contains was made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., a company partially owned by the Chinese government.
U.S. sanctions were intended to slow China’s progress in emerging fields like artificial intelligence and big data by cutting off its ability to buy or build advanced semiconductors, which are the brains of these systems.
“This shows that Chinese companies like Huawei still have plenty of capability to innovate,” said Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University and author of the book “Chip War.” “I think it will also probably intensify debate in Washington on whether restrictions are to be tightened.”
Willy Shih, an economist at Harvard Business School, said Huawei’s breakthrough was evocative of what happened with Global Positioning System technology, now commonly known as GPS.
For instance, Intel recently announced it will have to pay $353 million in termination fees to Israel’s Tower Semiconductor after failing to acquire Chinese regulatory approval for the acquisition.
The original article contains 1,523 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Reading this after watching a video about how the Russian economy is humming along instead of collapsing makes me think there's a class of people informing Biden that are idiots. Sanctions diplomacy once again accomplishes barely anything. I can't believe people are getting paid for such shitty advice.
watching a video about how the Russian economy is humming along
Source?
It's a YouTuber, Reallifelore, Why Russia Isn't Actually Collapsing. He mentions Russia is running a big deficit, but that's not the economic collapse that was predicted.
Sanctions diplomacy is counterproductive. Globalization worked by making countries too interdependent to fuck around.
Now? China's domestic technology capability is growing at an astonishing rate.
The sanctions regime was effective at one time, because America basically had a stranglehold on the world economy. Sure, sanctions never caused a regime change in Cuba or Iran, but those countries were economically devastated and that was the actual goal.
Things have changed. As dedollarization and multipolarity become dominant, all sanctions are doing is accelerating dedollarization and multipolarity. America is now hurting itself with its sanctions regime as much as its enemies, and it's only going to get worse.
China can't be stopped. 😊