What happens when there is an x86 CPU ban on servers, workstations, and supercomputers?
You realize Intel has a near monopoly here, right?
They are not important. Playing videogames is not a matter of national importance.
Existing stocks will last for quite a while, you can use lower power SoC to take the slack in a crunch, and you really don't have PCs being a big export category, unlike the entirety of light industry.
Internal consumption of PCs matter relatively little in comparison to export value of light industries and
its importance for maintaining China's grip on the world.
Paul, MCUs had been almost the same for the past 40 years. Go figure genius. Chinese companies do make them with some oem brand
I figured that out long ago, and deal with it on every day basis. Chinese MCU companies are not competitive at large, otherwise we would've be buying them and not importing Atmel, NXP, and STM by tonnes.
For the few worthy contenders, I know each of them, and in few cases their C-levels personally. And the best contender, Espressif, is not even run by a Chinese citizen. Zhang Ruian is Singaporean.
First, MCUs are low-cost, mass-produced, commodity ICs. They are all about the same.
They are way, way, way more to it than you ever imagine, and even in the most commoditised parts of the MCU market, there are own intricacies. China once made those generic 8051 clones, but where they are now?
Programming model of 8051 was very old school, archaic, and inconvenient: multiple memory banks, inability to use external memory in a convenient manner, low code density and unsuitability for use with modern compilers, wildly varying instruction execution times. I can count 10 more things that put 8051 (and therefore its clones) into the scrap heap of history.
Even 5 cents MCUs that are used for "singing postcards," are now using Atmel, PIC or 32bit Arm based MCUs because there are ones that are cheap enough and easier to program than 8051.
The importance for an MCU to be easily programmable by a modern programming language was completely overlooked by domestic makers.
As for meself, am currently in process engineering in the Probe area of the wafer manufacturing process, from wafer start to wafer sales.
https://www.mjc.co.jp/en/technology/column/wafer_prober.html
MJC is just one vendor I work with. Other vendors are FormFactor and TEL. I do not engage in die extraction and packaging but am high level familiar with those processes in order to fine tune the Probe testing processes.
I will be watching your participation about this particular issue with interests. Hope you keep those qualities.
Nice to see somebody else from semiconductors industry here. Stuff like testing, process control, and metrology are not less important than the lithography itself. My own biggest suspicion about what is wrong with Chinese fabs is that those bimbos very likely continuing to dish out big money for the latest litho equipment while completely foregoing the metrology and control. My latest experience talking with Unigroup and Canyon Bridge (really just a another Unigroup front) staffers, only reinforced that opinion further.
In semiconductors, you can buy an equipment for a certain node, but can not really "buy a process." These days, you can only develop the process (in a literal sense of the world) for your own use scenarios, tuned for your business circumstances. For what Chinese industry needs, yields are paramount for many reasons, including the need for reducing the testing expense. And those guys are trying to make commodity products on an expensive, low yield multiple patterning node...